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GO TO MLC HOMEPAGE
Sean Ó Faoláin Short Story Competition
now open!
ONLINE BOOKSTORE FEATURED TITLES
Songs of Earth and Light
Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
Munster Literature Centre
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Brian Turner served for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq from November 2003 with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. In 1999-2000 he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division. Born in 1967, he received an MFA from the University of Oregon and lived abroad in South Korea for a year before joining the army. His collection Here, Bullet (Bloodaxe 2007) was first published in the US in 2005, where it has earned Turner nine major literary awards, including a 2006 Lannan Literary Fellowship and a 2007 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry. His second collection (Phantom Noise) will be available from Bloodaxe in 2010. _____
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The grace of the world survives our intervention
As dawn approaches the city of Mosul, a dense fog hangs in the eucalyptus grove. A water buffalo lifts its head from the belly-high grass, its nostrils wet and shining, to breathe in the damp smell of earth, the ammunition belts and army winter coats left rotting in the park these many years. In the fog, among the grass-covered berms of old tank emplacements, the trunks of trees take on the shadowy forms of men, women, children who are coming closer, perhaps, or moving away—it’s difficult to tell, these shadows in the half-light of dawn,
who have found the small bright lanterns of sunlight breaking through the leaves above.
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You would’ve turned twelve this year, sometime late November. When the rains come.
When the Tule fog starts to lift off the San Joaquin river, drifting out over the orange groves with their fruit
frozen solid on the hard-packed ground, old tires at the ends of rows lit with gasoline fires
to keep them warm. When I was twelve, my brother and I climbed the shingled rooftop
to look out over a sea of fog, country houses with only their chimneys visible in the distance,
firesmoke trailing them like strange flagless ships steaming toward the far horizon. Everything
seemed possible, then. History was still being made. We talked of riding Chinese junks in the Yellow Sea,
Arab dhows in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of East Africa, entire continents just waiting for us to explore.
I never told my brother about you. He’s had enough— his fourth child turned blue with a strangling cord
at birth, the nineteen months spent waiting for him to die, and people would say Such a beautiful child, that Ethan.
And yet, my unborn, you never even had a name. Just a month when you would’ve been born, and me, waiting.
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Tomorrow is made of shrapnel and blood. There will come a time when the trigger calls you out quickly into the streets. And as you leave the barrel I can’t promise you won’t kill the man who has waited all his life for the answer to this moment, but if you lean to the right, if you lean back and look as hard as you can for that mountain you came from, the sunlight warming the pines, clouds approaching from the north with their gift of silence, if you do this you might just graze the man’s temple, so close you might hear his name, the humming of blood over bone, the many voices within, the years to come.
©2009 Brian Turner
Author Links New Yorker article about Turner Video of Turner reading at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival
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©2009 Southword Editions and Munster Literature Centre |
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