It's me, Oh Lord, Standing with a Gun

Presented by Radin Nasuhakamar binti Radin Shamsulkamar

D-day, Normandy Landings, Omaha Beach, (1940s).

This poem tells us of what happened on the battlefield back in World war II as the poet, Hubert Creekmore himself was part of the U.S Navy before turning to literature after his retirement. Creekmore has five other poems and has translated four of Stephane Mallarme.

Poem

It's Me, Oh Lord, Standing With a Gun

They crouch in the barge

and the palms roll close,

Green echo, high over sand, of waves,

Of gray jelly-fish in smoke puffs whose

Invisible sting is swift and leaden.

They crouch, tongue dry, in the boat,

And all the world is a puny beach-head :

World of clean-sliced hemispheres

Of latitudes of love and crime,

Peopled with the mental smears

Of medieval magic, thinning

To a short horizon

Under war's tremendous engine

Through which the war

blood streams, and great

Einsteinian logistics, drown

Upon this coast of conquest.

Here is All of war, compact.

It is simple.

It is death-fear.

Undiscriminating death

Appraises his approaching guests,

Uniform in gear, beneath which shiver bodies,

black and white skinned, but uniform in value

As currency of life,

Their insight

Penetrates the island's pull,

Magnetic jointure of here-after.

Across the rail, the Negro full

In death's face stares and blinks,

beside him,

son of owners of slaves,

Floating of a mortal hyphen,

tongue-tied.

And the hyphen joins the puzzled past:

The tired way, down which they came,

Twin exile of historic trust,

And fades in the jungle's blinding chaos.

For on that final range

Men sprawled, too patient in the wave lay

Letting the gently anxious foam

Entomb their scars in sand.

No scales

Enamel the minds of two from whom

All memory soon may flee. The Negro

And the Southern man

Reflect how inner bondage subtly

Links them to oppose what fought,

At home between them: tenant house

Of jerried boards, and

house it wrought

Of moonbeam pillars; loom of clod-veined

Overalls that wove

Traditions's silky gown. The drained blood

Mirrors doubly self and war.

Retreating in the glasses to

Extinction.

The Negro fighting for

A freedom fraud, the white for freedom

Mortgaged to mistrust,

Fight to shield the bigot's long breed.

And while the boat rolled on the waves,

Palm surf roaring at their face,

The Negro felt, not as on slaves,

The white hand on his arm, and heard him:

"We can do it, can't we"

And some familiar thing was lost words

The strakes grate on the shore, defy

Horizon turned foreground of slaughter.

Whether I, the Negro, lie here or return,

by all past tokens,

Medals are for white men,

Jim crow life for me and my folk

Upon the coral shingle they leap,

And rush the smoking jungle.

Round their legs the salt-curls break and seep,

Crumbling soon the mold of footprints,

streaks of red, shell-studded blot in sand,

in waves are washed mute.

What happened?

Around the 1940s, the Allied forces (France, England, United States, Canada, and their aids) invaded Normandy. This took place on Omaha Beach, hence the descriptions of boats, palms and sand. Although the main point of the poem is to honour and tell the story of the soldiers that participated in Operation Neptune of what happened on the day. Not only is the poet telling a story about their fallen heroes but he also mentions segregation of race and the irony of it. The obvious use of 'white and black-skinned' and 'the Negro'. The irony of fighting in a war for men who enslave others but the badges of honour are not for the ones who re of colour but only given to those who are fair-skinned. Thus, the mention of 'Jim Crow life for me and my folk'. The fallen heroes are not only those who had sacrificed their life against the Germans but also those whose names that will forever be lost due to only honouring one race.

Lessons

Race does not determine the success of a battle.