Opus
They cut off hands and composed cantatas;
They gutted their neighbors like fish and released
The shape of spirits from bonds of ebony;
They buried populations in pits, seeking the proper word.
They herded women into shivering lines
And raped and stabbed upon convenience.
They burned anything they found susceptible of flame,
Performing that miracle play, Apocalypse, every day.
Undaunted, they swallowed the hearts of enemies.
Unmoved, they confirmed dead men in the true faith.
They killed or were killed and always,
Above the smoking city, the vast lake tinged with blood,
There rose a little tune that seemed its own creation,
A lullaby, an anthem, seductive serenade.
Victims, they could be made to suffer—
It was their stock in trade,
Their competence and true possession, the good
They offered, bargaining with fate—
Victims could be broken, equated with the earth,
Starved to shadows and given to the night, and yet
Survivors could not keep from song,
Or never long, would not leave off their burden,
Brave quaver amid ruins.
Melody attended them like misery, because
The bloodlust was the song,
Its sound another kind of killing,
Because the violence and invention were as stops
Along a scale, and it was all a sort of music,
An instinctive rendering, an exuberant attack,
The one coherence snarled enough to answer
In their case: poor connoisseurs of panic,
Their cornered frenzy held the key, and naturally
They could not be restrained or ever end
That common urge and compromised relation,
The uncaring air which they called art
And by which they excused themselves.
Copyright Credit: George Bradley, “Opus” from The Fire Fetched Down. Copyright © 1996 by George Bradley. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: The Fire Fetched Down (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996)