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CONSEQUENCE Magazine
When nations declare war, justification can be little more than a legal document-declaration trumping the reason behind it. Religious teaching often confers the moral legitimacy that political ideologies lack. In a global, post-modern world, what principles differentiate acts of war by sovereign nations from those of rogue states and militant extremists? How are personal responsibility and identity related to war? Join us for a roundtable discussion, as our four distinguished guests consider war in the context of how nations, religions, societies and individuals understand their actions.
Joyce Peseroff presents
The night before the 2010 election, I sat with 200 others in a western Maine music hall to hear Joan Baez sing. I was reminded of a time when freedom referred to human struggle rather than to corporate trade, when war and peace were subjects of passion. Not a single campaign in the midterm election engaged the two wars we have been fighting for almost a decade. Not even the raw dispatches recently leaked from the Pentagon aroused more than a public sigh—nothing new here, just confirmation of the worst, and let's turn the page. The poems submitted for Consequence's poetry prize offered a profound corrective to cultural indifference. Over a hundred voices bruised by war—soldiers, kin, witnesses to and victims of violence from the French and Indian Wars to the Big Muddy we're hip-deep in today—shook me awake. How absent these mourning songs are from public life! I may be conscious of war and its costs, but I've easily avoided the toll of grief, its burning pity and terror. Of the many worthy entries, Andrea Bates' "From Here" impressed me with its creation of a palpable place, its expressive language, and its compassion. The Marine base becomes a microcosm of history and the world, its particulars as sharply observed as Ithaca's on Odysseus' return. A reader departs from the page transformed. Honorable mentions go to Juleigh Howard Hobson's villanelle/monologue, and to James Tyner's balance and parsing of personal agony with national anguish. Both poems use voice and repetition to create a fabric of language that binds a reader to the moment. That evening in November, Baez ended her concert with "Day After Tomorrow," a song about a soldier longing for home. With a voice still clear, if an octave lower than 40 years ago, she sang about the lives of those we overlook and forget. The poems I read did the same; Consequence urges, never forget. —Joyce
Peseroff From Here by Andrea Bates If you're from here you know you need a pass to drive through the main gate, that every other bumper sticker you'll see says my son defends our freedom or half my heart is in Iraq. If you're from here you know to avoid Western Boulevard on payday Fridays and stay home with your bucket of chicken and fries because the chain restaurants will be packed with hi and tights fisting back another beer with a whiskey chaser on the side. If you're from here you know The Osprey swoops low over the river on its way to the Air Station. Don't bother to try and dial your cell phone on that bridge, near that tower Because you don't have military clearance and troop transport signals jam you right out. If you're from here you know some of your students strip at the club, they write about how bored they are with their boyfriends gone, how they're trying to make more of their future from a few dollars tucked tight into a string flossing their hip bones. If you're from here you know some sounds are not thunder, some sounds boom hard against the sky, some sounds drop the heart beat down twelve gauged notches, all that ammo they test, blow high in practice runs out on the field. If you're from here you know the sound of sky falling, what your college classroom looks like: a cement block room darkened, the HVAC wheezing inside the five p.m. silence of a dozen twenty year olds, who rest their heads inside tattooed arms of globes and anchors, their t-shirts that say pain is weakness leaving the body, every one of those eyes can't look up at you, not yet, so you wait a few moments before switching on the light because when you're from here you know the news is never good. |
