AB Negative (The Surgeon’s Poem)

Thalia Fields lies under a grey ceiling of clouds,
just under the turbulence, with anesthetics
dripping from an IV into her arm,
and the flight surgeon says The shrapnel
cauterized as it traveled through her
here, breaking this rib as it entered,
burning a hole through the left lung
to finish in her back, and all of this
she doesn’t hear, except perhaps as music —
that faraway music of people’s voices
when they speak gently and with care,
a comfort to her on a stretcher
in a flying hospital en route to Landstahl,
just under the rain at midnight, and Thalia
drifts in and out of consciousness
as a nurse dabs her lips with a moist towel,
her palm on Thalia’s forehead, her vitals
slipping some, as burned flesh gives way
to the heat of the blood, the tunnels within
opening to fill her, just enough blood
to cough up and drown in; Thalia
sees the shadows of people working
to save her, but she cannot feel their hands,
cannot hear them any longer,
and when she closes her eyes
the most beautiful colors rise in darkness,
tangerine washing into Russian blue,
with the droning engine humming on
in a dragonfly’s wings, island palms
painting the sky an impossible hue
with their thick brushes dripping green…
a way of dealing with the fact
that Thalia Fields is gone, long gone,
about as far from Mississippi
as she can get, ten thousand feet above Iraq
with a blanket draped over her body
and an exhausted surgeon in tears,
his bloodied hands on her chest, his head
sunk down, the nurse guiding him
to a nearby seat and holding him as he cries,
though no one hears it, because nothing can be heard
where pilots fly in blackout, the plane
like a shadow guiding the rain, here
in the droning engines of midnight.

(c) Brian Turner

from Here, Bullet by Brian Turner (Bloodaxe Books, 2007)

About the Poem:

On January 7 I did a “Just Arrived” post for two books of poetry, US poet Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet (Bloodaxe, 2007) and Phantom Noise (Bloodaxe, 2010.)  As I said in that post: “I first heard of Brian when I was driving to one of the Autumn Poetry Readings of the Canterbury Poets’ Collective in 2009 and tuned into a public radio documentary on contemporary war poetry. Brian Turner was one of the featured poets and I heard his poem ‘AB Negative (The Surgeon’s Poem)‘ for the first time.”

I found the poem deeply moving because of that connection it gives us to the frail humanity of Thalia Fields who is “about as far from Mississippi//as she can get.” Currently, I am slowly working my way through the Here, Bullet collection and it is full of poems that make that same connection. These poems are about the war in Iraq and the key adjective I would use to describe them is “observational.”  The poems observe, record, note, but make no judgments outside of the personal—leaving the reader to make up his or her own mind on the subject of this war, its brutality and its human cost. In this sense, I am finding it war poetry in the tradition of the First World War poet, Wilfrid Owen, who wrote: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

About the Poet:

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