Song
The wars are everywhere, o even within.
Drawn in poor bee by the dance loud hum
Of some other tribe, poor bee. Even the center, even the heart,
Keeps a sting sharp: art stings thought, thought stings art.
Petty realm of the long known. Are there other ways to learn to sing?
Clash of long dead blades in the fallow fields
And the wind that blows truce for an hour whistles loud the rash
Martial tune. Some scribe handles himself. “Use it,” sings the song.
Copyright @ 2014 by Dan Beachy-Quick. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on August 25, 2014.
“This ‘Song’ comes from a chapbook, to be published by Omnidawn next April, titled Shields & Shards & Stitches & Songs. It’s deeply concerned with the ways in which poetry, like a shield, often becomes a token of the violence it means most to avert. Seven ‘shield’ poems suffer a damage via erasure to become ‘shards,’ the shards are again acted against to leave the barest sense of ‘stitches’ in hope that the sutured wound could allow the healing that becomes ‘songs.’ This ‘Song’ is the final result of one shield altering through the entire process—a way, I hope, not to sing simply against the impossibly large human history of war, but to sing through it.”
–Dan Beachy-Quick
Dan Beachy-Quick
Beachy-Quick is the author six books of poetry and the translator of Mountain—Wind—Oak: The Poems of Sappho, forthcoming in 2023 from Tupelo Press, as well as The Thinking Root: The Poetry of Early Greek Philosophy, forthcoming in 2023 from Milkweed Press.