Aria for the Dead Ones – The Poetry Society: Poems

Berlin

A soldier, impressionist as he dies. Then he’s perpendicular
to death: a simple rosebud in the hair of a painted daughter

who will die later that night. In the backdrop, the moon galloping
like a prayer might—feral horse, immortal patch of sky in its wake.

Though most aren’t queer, I watch the soldiers die the queerest
death I know: anonymous, kneeled in a patch of dirt, wondering

what Heaven is like, if they’ll see it. Their horses, brothers—
humming like the Chevy I’d imagine a queer-basher might drive.

How the brake lights gallop, how the queer prayers dangle and snag
like wedding cans on a bumper through side-brush. Rifle-

mouthed, garotted—it’s easy to forget about soldier-mothers,
soldier-wives. Across Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia, South Carolina:

blown kisses from gone boys, years-old, rise like fog into the attic. Until
the windows can’t contain their pressure, and the mothers, the sisters—queer

boys, soldiers, is there a difference?—must unfasten them from their cheeks.

About this poem

This poem is commended in the Timothy Corsellis Prize 2019 on Young Poets Network (YPN), judged by Fran Brearton, MRIA, Professor of Modern Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast, and a recognised authority on 20th century war poetry; Karen Leeder, FRSA, poet and professor of Modern German Literature at New College, Oxford; Susie Thornberry, Assistant Director of the Imperial War Museum in London; and Judith Palmer, Director of The Poetry Society. The Timothy Corsellis Prize is an annual poetry prize calling for poems in response to a selection of poets of the Second World War, including Keith Douglas, Sidney Keyes, Alun Lewis, John Jarmain, Henry Reed, Anna Akhmatova, Gertrud Kolmar, Günter Eich, Miklós Radnóti and Timothy Corsellis.

Peter LaBerge, the poet, said of writing this poem, "Growing up queer in an America that watches half-heartedly as homophobia dims the lights of countless American children and young adults, I think this poem was pre-destined to be unapologetically queer. The ultimate senselessness of wartime devastation, the randomness and suddenness of wartime deaths, the mission for expression and freedom, the presence of oppression—these are all ways in which the modern struggle for queer liberation and the WWII-era struggle to defeat fascism conceptually overlap.

While my unflinching appreciation for LGBT+ World War poets like Wilfred Owen and Sigfried Sassoon led me to initially explore this intersection, it was “War Poet” by Sidney Keyes that set it ablaze. There’s no evidence, to be sure, that Keyes was a member of the LGBT+ community, but Keyes's cast of images—particularly considering contemporary aesthetics—stood to shatter conventions of 20th century British poetry, while simultaneously redefining conversations of wartime conduct and ambitions altogether."