A Brief History of Hostility - In the beginning
by Jamaal May
In the beginning there was the war.
The war said let there be war and there was war.
The war said let there be peace and there was war.
The people said music and rain evaporating against fire in the brush was a kind of music and so was the beast.
The beast that roared or bleated when brought down was silent when skinned but loud after the skin was pulled taut over wood and the people said music and the thump thump thump said drum. Someone said war drum. The drum said war is coming to meet you in the field. The field said war tastes like copper, said give us some more, said look at the wild flowers our war plants in a grove and grows just for us.
Outside sheets are pulling this way and that.
Fields are smoke, smoke is air.
We wait for fingers to be bent knuckle to knuckle,
the porch overrun with rope and shotgun
but the hounds don’t show. We beat the drum and sing
like there’s nothing outside but rust-colored clay and fields
of wild flowers growing farther than we can walk.
Torches may come like fox paws to steal away what we plant,
but with our bodies bound by the skin, my arc to his curve,
we are stalks that will bend and bend and bend…
fire for heat fire for light fire for casting figures on a dungeon wall
fire for teaching shadows to writhe fire for keeping beasts at bay fire to give them back to the earth
fire for the siege fire to singe fire to roast fire to fuse rubber soles to collapsed crossbeams fire for Gehenna
fire for Dante fire for Fallujah fire for readied aim
fire in the forge that folds steel like a flag fire to curl worms like cigarette ash fire to give them back to the earth
fire for ancient reasons: to call down rain fire to catch it and turn it into steam fire for churches fire for a stockpile of books fire for a bible-black cloak tied to a stake
fire for smoke signals fire to shape gun muzzle and magazine fire to leap from the gut of a furnace fire for Hephaestus fire for pyres’ sake fire licking the toes of a quiet brown man fire for his home fire for her flag fire for this sand, to coax it into glass
fire to cure mirrors fire to cure leeches Fire to compose a nocturne of cinders
fire for the trash cans illuminating streets fire for fuel fire for fields fire for the field hand’s fourth death
fire to make a cross visible for several yards fire from the dragon’s mouth fire for smoking out tangos fire to stoke like rage and fill the sky with human remains fire to give them back to the earth fire to make twine fall from bound wrists fire to mark them all and bubble black any flesh it touches as it frees
They took the light from our eyes. Possessive. Took the moisture from our throats. My arms, my lips, my sternum, sucked dry, and lovers of autumn say, Look, here is beauty. Tallness only made me an obvious target made of off-kilter limbs. I’d fall either way. I should get a to-the-death tattoo or metal ribbon of some sort. War took our prayers like nothing else can, left us dumber than remote drones. Make me a loyal soldier and I’ll make you a lamenting so thick, metallic, so tank-tread-hard.
Now make tomorrow a gate shaped like a man. I can’t promise, when it’s time, I won’t hesitate, cannot say I won’t forget to return in fall and guess the names of the leaves before they change.
The war said bring us your dead and we died. The people said music and bending flower, so we sang ballads
in the aisles of churches and fruit markets. The requiem was everywhere: a comet’s tail disappearing into the atmosphere,
the wide mouths of the bereft men that have sung… On currents of air, seeds were carried as the processional carried us
through the streets of a forgetting city, between the cold iron of gates. The field said soil is rich wherever we fall.
Aren’t graveyards and battlefields our most efficient gardens? Journeys begin there too if the flowers are taken
into account, and shouldn’t we always take the flowers into account? Bring them to us. We’ll come back to you. Peace will come to you
as a rosewood-colored road paver in your grandmother’s town, as a trench scraped into canvas, as a violin bow, a shovel,
an easel, a brushstroke that covers burial mounds in grass. And love, you say, is a constant blade, a trowel that plants
and uproots, and tomorrow will be a tornado, you say. Then war, a sick wind, will come to part the air,
straighten your suit, and place fresh flowers on all our muddy graves.
Jamaal May, "A Brief History of Hostility" from The Big Book of Exit Strategies. Copyright © 2016 by Jamaal May. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Alice James Books, www.alicejamesbooks.org.
