After the Six-Day War
There were thirty of us in the old work truck
Out to sightsee the captured Golan.
Avraham, our guide,
Expressed his pride in half a dozen languages,
Driving one-handed, microphone in the other,
Pointing out sites of historical interest,
Scenes of particular carnage, while we
Tourist-workers, packed in back, all shook up,
Took in the abandoned ephemera of battle lost:
Used shells, dud green hand grenades,
Sandbags, command huts, latrines,
Overturned trucks, an immobilised tank’s
Once thrusting eager barrel
As impotent now as a spent erection,
Stained torn army fatigues,
Hats with funny pulldown earflaps,
And shoes, dozens of shoes, hundreds,
Lodged in the parched earth like
Drained limbs seeking rebirth.
The bodies had long been handed over
To relatives for ritual mourning, old snapshots
Set to become well-thumbed icons of
My brother, my son, my lover, my pal,
He died for his people, he was brave.
At ancient, now silent Quneitra
We pulled in to a grove of mellow cypresses
To eat our cold packed tourist lunches
From plastic containers, pleased with ourselves
As though we had personally conquered here,
Singing and joking together to prove our camaraderie;
And later, in an incongruously modern theatre,
Little John tossed his hat into the stalls
And urinated from the stage, to cheers.
Every building stood empty.
Every house on every street.
All doors flung back, or kicked in.
In the gloom, dusty spirals of afterlight,
Tables displaying the remnants
Of prematurely ended meals, half empty cups
Accumulating mould, bugs in stone-dry bread,
Pottery shards on cold floors, beds left unmade.
All the treasured keepsakes, all the families gone,
Bundled into cars and carts and lorries
As the town disgorged its heart on the black road
Between the blue Syrian hills.
When the soldiers came they met no resistance,
Met no one at all; went away again triumphant.
Only the dogs remained. The dogs and the rats,
Picking over the bones of dead houses.
As our truck bumped back towards
Green Galilee through the humid afternoon
Our earlier exuberance was no more.
The air was uneasy with dark possibilities.
Could it be, our silence seemed to say,
That next time it might be our shoes
Planted in the dust, our photographs passed
From hand to grieving hand,
Our trenches overrun, homes abandoned,
Our families trailing mile on mile
Along a thin black road;
And in our wake the multi-lingual patriotism
Of another guide, another Avraham,
Who next time might not be a Jew?
About this poem
A poem written at the time described, on a kibbutz a mile from the Lebanese border.
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Written on October 10, 1967
Submitted by wordybug on December 08, 2024
- 2:18 min read
- 110 Views
Quick analysis:
| Scheme | XABCDXEXXXXXXAXCXXXDXXXX DCCXXEDXXEXXBXXXXXFGXXXXC XXXFXXXXXXGXXX |
|---|---|
| Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
| Characters | 2,509 |
| Words | 461 |
| Stanzas | 3 |
| Stanza Lengths | 24, 25, 14 |
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"After the Six-Day War" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2025. Web. 22 Jan. 2025. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/206468/after-the-six-day-war>.
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