[W T Clark]

.
.
.

Complexities are hard to kill:
they multiply, like the little children who are dying
(which is, we know, a tragedy). Still,
we wish the children were just dead, instead of dying

since to watch whatsoever dying
child is tragic: but to have them all lose their lives
(which is, we know, our fault) with that constant, endless dying!
& you must also know there's dying on both sides

& it's our children who must lose their lives
looking exactly like the other children who are dying,
the ones who die that there might be "dying on both sides":
that we can't show the world our little ones, our dying

without it thinking of those other kids who die:
whose deaths were gospel (someone should have warned them)
the moment we heard our children's cries.
& so we kill those children just to mourn them,

whose world was cruel (we had no language in which to warn them).
We know the situation's complicated — still,
we have grown skillful now, despite our mourning,
& since complexities are hard to kill.
.
.
.

[Joe Crocker]

I don’t know what inspired this Cameron but it brings to my mind the Hamas slaughter of Israeli innocents and Israel’s need to avenge it. What is the equation that will satisfy that need? (It’s complicated). The two lines that disturbed me most were “we wish the children were just dead, instead of dying” and “& so we kill those children just to mourn them,”

The phrase about "dying on both sides" is both ugly in itself and implies some kind of calculation or weighing up.

Do you know the Leonard Cohen song “Faith”?

A cross on every hill
A star, a minaret
So many graves to fill
Oh love, aren't you tired yet?
So many graves to fill
Oh love, aren't you tired yet?

[R. Nemo Hill]

I wouldn't have thought wordplay capable of addressing our frustratingly horrific realities, but you prove through this remarkable piece that it can do justice to the infernal complexity of historically repetitious current events. It seems, here, that only only by consciously rejecting the outraged echo chamber of morality, in favor of the abstract echo chamber of bare language, can an accurate picture be painted of our ultimate distress.

Powerful, Cameron.

Nemo

[Jim Moonan]

.
I got hooked by the word “whatsoever”. It snuck up and overwhelmed me. —Though I was circling the heart of the poem from the first “children”. (In particular “little children”, which overcomes its redundancy and instead evokes a keen sense of ultra innocence.) Children are strewn throughout. Dying is prevalent throughout. Kill stalks throughout. It's relentless. Senseless. Full of atrocities.

I will push back ever so gently just to say that, though the children are your focus, the anguish that must be endured by a surviving parent of an innocent is fathomless. The greatest sorrow is that of a parent who loses a child.

The parentheses are painful and act as the poem’s conscience.

Your best voice (that I can remember).


(.

[Hilary Biehl]

I don't have anything helpful or substantive to say, but I found this to be both moving and truthful. I think most attempts at writing about such events feel manipulative in some way; this one doesn't.

[Julie Steiner]

A powerful pantoum variant (but please don't regularize it — it's just right).

"Offering to Moloch" might be another title possibility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch

[Cally Conan-Davies]

Cam - this is the best use of repetitive form. The energy of the syntax, the forward momentum over and over bangs its head on the same wall/word, "dying". Like there's no getting around it. For some reason, it bought to mind "Naming of the Parts". Not that your poem is like that in any way other than showing how language can be used to confront horror, how the mind reacts to unthinkable things.

Terrific work!

Cally

[Matt Q]

Hi Cameron,

Just wanted to echo the praise this has had.

The use of repetition is very effective, building energy, hammering this all home like an aerial bombardment. And whilst this is satire, and political (in the broader sense), it doesn't feeling like its preaching or taking a side.

I think the title is spot on. The poem is playing with, and exaggerating and reducing to absurdity, the cliched platitudes we are all familiar with around the deaths of children in wars and other militarised attacks.

Also, because the title suggests that what might follow is some writing advice, I find myself hearing an echo of the old poetry advice, "murder your darlings", in the first line, since said poetic darlings are notoriously "hard to kill".

I think the use of the word "gospel" is interesting and helps to free the poem from an application simply to Jewish/Muslim conflict, even though Israel/Palestine is obviously brought to mind strongly. Or maybe it doesn't: I guess there are some evangelical Christians in the US who strongly support Israel's actions, and find justification in the New and the Old Testament, and there are even those who seem to believe that the conflict heralds the Biblical apocalypse, and support if for that reason. So I guess it could be a reference to that. Still the poem seems more broadly applicable, to me.

Only one thing really struck a slightly wrong note for me, and that was "kids". It seems out of voice among the more formal "children".

best,

Matt

[Carl Copeland]

Heterometric, yes, but still the most regularly metered and rhymed poem of yours I’ve read, Cameron. The iambic beat is part of its “forward momentum,” as Cally calls it. And instead of “expressing” the content with a disturbingly irregular form, you undermine it with a smooth cadence that says something about the banality of killing (or, as I realized later, the response to killing). The repetitions and irony heighten the contrast, which is disturbing in its own way.

I was about to criticize “Looking exactly like the other children who are dying,” but finally got around to reading the title (and Matt’s comment) and realized that this is only the plainest of a string of playful platitudes (or near-platitudes). It was a clue I needed, though I wonder whether you should have given it to me. What we have, then, is a lament about suffering children that exposes its own ineffectual, routine and self-soothing nature. Maybe that’s what Nemo said.

When you put quotes around “dying on both sides,” are you quoting yourself? Is that necessary?

[John Riley]

Cam, I've been reading this since it was posted. I have no suggestions for improvement. For me to attempt to improve it would be vanity.

The poems of so many met poets read as though the poet comes up with a neat idea, then decides which words to turn into end-rhymes, works out the meter, and that's it. They end up with a tchotchke. You don't do that. Your poems roar, shake, startle. There is an active consciousness inside the poem we can see working. I hope you know how different that is. How special. How much I hope that you are still writing after so many of us here are gone.