Léon Damas is one of the great poets of the French language. He hails from French Guiana and in his poems speaks often as “the colonized personality.” Denise Levertov, sees herself as a feminist and antiwar activist. It is interesting that her Poem about Vietnam compares the place where wars happen, to the USA where in our modern world, a major war has not been experienced in over a hundred plus years. Issues of complacency, and acceptance are prevalent themes in these poems. Jacques Prévert’s poem FAMILIAL from his book Paroles, is a contemplation of this complacency and acceptance of war as part of on-going mundane life. That dynamic is what creates the sense of horror the poem invokes.
My own contemplation of war in MERELY A VISION is about the sense of removal from such horrors as are created in other cities where devastation and invasion by military might is experienced to a degree this editor finds incomprehensible.
THEY CAME THAT NIGHT – Léon Damas
For Léopold Sédar Senghor
They came that night as the
tom
tom
rolled
from
rhythm
to rhythm
the frenzy
of eyes
the frenzy of hands
the frenzy
of statue feet
How many of ME ME ME
have died
SINCE THEN
since they came that night when the
tom
tom
rolled
from
rhythm
to rhythm
the frenzy
of eyes
the frenzy
of hands
the frenzy
of statue feet
Léon Damas
—
FRAGRANCE OF LIFE, ODOR OF DEATH – Denise Levertov
All the while among
the rubble even, and in
the hospitals, among the wounded,
not only beneath
lofty clouds
in temples
by the shores of lotus-dreaming
lakes
a fragrance:
flowers, incense, the earth-mist rising
of mild daybreak in the delta – god smell
of life.
It’s in America
where no bombs ever
have screamed down smashing
the buildings, shredding the people’s bodies,
tossing the fileds of Kansas or vermont or Maryland into
the air
to land wrong way up, a gash of earth-guts …
it’s in America, everywhere, a faint seepage,
I smell death.
Denise Levertov
Hanoi-Boston-Maine, November 1972
—
FAMILIAL
Jacques Prévert
The mother does the knitting
The son fights the war
She finds this quite natural the mother
And the father what does he do the father?
he does business
His wife does knitting
His son the war
He business
He finds this quite natural the father
And the son and the son
What does the son find the son?
He finds absolutely nothing the son
His mother does the knitting his father business he war
When he finishes the war
He’ll go into business with his father
The war continues the mother continues she knits
The father continues he does business
The son is killed he continues no more
The father and mother go to the graveyard
They find this quite natural the father and mother
Life continues life with knitting war business
Business war knitting war business
Business war knitting war
Business business business
Life wit the graveyard.
Jacques Prévert
—
MERELY A VISION
Doctori Sadisco
I who have never
had to hide
in an attic, trembling,
who has never had
to go into the street
to fetch the severed limbs
of my neighbors,
who has never had to
live with fear deeper
than even death and who
has not once had to forgive
in order to get out from
beneath the tyranny of bitterness
or felt the one thing worse
than a bomb, which is
unbridled hatred for those
who take away my world.
Doctori Sadisco
——
Léon Damas was born in 1912 in French Guiana.
Counted among the French speaking Caribbean poets
of the Twentieth Century, he most certainly can
be sited as a poet of Witness. Poem from the volume,
The Negritude Poets, edited by Ellen Conroy Kennedy -
Thunder’s Mouth Press – New York
The Denise Levertov – Fragrance of Life, Odor of Death
appears in AGAINST FORGETTING – Editor, Carolyn Forché
W.W. Norton & Company New York / London
Jacques Prévert – FAMILIAL – Translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
From: Paroles – Pocket Poet Series # 9 – City Lights Books San Francisco, California
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