Three Poems by Lynda Tavakoli

 

War and Want

The dust is first - always,

before the sun crisps the skin

or sand moulds molten heat

between our toes,

there is always and ever

the dust to welcome us.

No orifice hides from its gritting,

no spit or piss protected from

the chaff of misted rock

that scrapes its way inside -

the powdered bones of the dead

ghosting their revenge.

Yet in the sleeping hours

I still dream of you,

beautiful even in the way

that angels are

who smile their enigmatic smiles

among the bloodied spoils of war.

For I feel the rise and fall of us

lusting my nights, like the killings

that also lust my days,

and will you forgive

my need for you

when you learn

of my hunger for both?

But you are not to know

these soldier thoughts

that scar my days and nights -

for the thing that was first is last, always,

disintegrating again to the fineness of dust,

welcoming us all.

Game On

In Syria the shooters

choose themes for target practice,

a living video game of

entertainment for the week.

On Saturday it’s chins -

anything below the nose, above the neck,

and rifle sights explore

a quivered lip

as points deduct for errors –

cheeks and ears are left

for Sunday’s sport.

On Monday, it’s the old,

their leech-peeled progress

over desert skin the easier to track,

points deducted for impairment

but added for an outright kill.

On Tuesday, pregnant women.

Two for the price of one (but scarce)

with double points for primary executions,

only if you’re in the zone.

On Wednesday, barrel metal

rests on gaping sills,

trigger fingers slack

for mobiles phoning home

while someone calculates the points

but lets the stretcher bearers

live upon a whim.

Thursday’s dawn will drone

unblinking and unlit,

sheltering the snipers’

bull’s-eyed sleep from heavenly foe.

Anonymous the joystick thumb

that strokes its target from

behind a foreign screen,

one final arbitrary theme,

the sum of all its parts,

no worse, no better

than what’s gone before.

Friday now and Holy Day.

Notch up the scores

before the credits start to roll

and silence sucks its permadeath of souls

into the black hole of a VDU.

St Symphorien Cemetery, Mons

(i.m. John Parr and George Ellison)

Under a gash of green between headstones,

whispers shrive confessions from the soil,

a paired history spliced by coincidence,

the last and the first, the first and last.

Your soldiers’ voices ricochet, tongue to tongue,

bullet words of war, a share of confidences

through a century of tortured sleep.

The other’s breath has known your cheek,

tasted your mouth, touched the sadness of your soul,

but the sniper-sharpness in your eyes remain

to ghost away romantic notions

fashioned from an accident of chance.

See instead, between your sleeps,

a truth of corpses, stenched in sludge –

the never to return again inheritance of war

and when your almost touching distance is complete,

pray that the cost has drenched our consciousness.

Lynda Tavakoli lives in County Down, Northern Ireland, where she facilitates an adult creative writing class and is a tutor for the Seamus Heaney Award for schools.

A poet, novelist and freelance journalist, Lynda’s writings have been published in the UK, Ireland, the US and the Middle East, with Farsi and Spanish translations. She has been winner of both poetry and short story prizes in Listowel, The Westival International Poetry Prize and runner- up in The Blackwater International Poetry Competition and Roscommon Poetry Competition.

Her poems have also appeared in The Irish Times, New Irish Writing. Lynda’s debut poetry collection, ‘The Boiling Point for Jam’ is published by Arlen House and includes these three poems about the different aspects of war.