Consulting an Elder Poet on an Anti-War Poem

By Duane Niatum b. 1938 Duane Niatum

for Elizabeth Bishop

You said to me that day,

“There’s nothing you can do,”

and spoke of Auden’s line:

“Poetry makes nothing happen.”

And though I honor you,

especially your poems,

the objects you dipped in light,

then, left in the rainbow,

let slip from our sight,

I admitted, diving out of self,

a sweet woman’s white caress,

the hundreds of lives and places

in books, failed to counter confusion.

You did agree that it

was Socrates who said

to his Athenian friends

that governments are only

governments with many heads

and cannot think as one.

That history continues to show

how they swing from war

to peace and back again,

in one wide gallow-sweep

just as the pendulum

of the world’s clocks

returned its towns to craters.

Now I must ask myself,

fifteen cobalt-blue years later,

if the dust of each new war

that settles in our bones,

and deadens a generation,

is no more than negatives

of the Kennedys, King, and Lennon,

has less weight than what

we felt the day the Apollo

spaceship landed on the moon,

and Auden’s line is true,

then why did you to the end,

live in the dark,

sing into your ruin?

Duane Niatum, “Consulting an Elder Poet on an Anti-War Poem” from Drawings of the Song Animals: New and Collected Poems. Copyright © 1991 by Duane Niatum. Reprinted by permission of Holy Cow! Press.

Source: Drawings of the Song Animals: New and Collected Poems (Holy Cow! Press, 1991)

Biography

Born Duane McGinness in Seattle, poet, fiction writer, playwright, and editor Duane Niatum adopted the name of one of his S’Klallam tribal ancestors early in his career as a poet. After his parents’ divorce when he was four, he studied S’Klallam tribal ways with his maternal grandfather. At age 17, Niatum joined the Navy and was stationed in Japan. He received a BA from the University of Washington, where he studied with

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