CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

A Single Field of Grief: American and Iranian Anti-War Voices

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

I have sought out the following to show that peace can be mutual across warring sides. The key is not to drift into maudlinness or sentimentality.

Across both American and Iranian poetic traditions, anti-war poetry leans towards a few core themes. The dehumanisation of conflict. The grief of survivors. The illusion of glory. And the long and often inescapable shadow of memory.

I could go further—comparing stylistic differences between American and Persian anti-war poetry, or offering longer excerpts and analyses—but I do not have the authority. I should leave that to academics.

For now, these simple, tentative findings will have to do.

War, as we know, divides the world into flags, languages, and the blunt and sometimes ugly arithmetic of sides. Poetry, at its most honest, when at its best, resists such divisions.

Through the eyes of poets—in this instance, American and Iranian—the world is not split but continuous. It is like a single field across which the same grief travels.

The grief just comes under different names—like a river, or some endless variation, into which a composer, say, like Bach, as well as a poet, might dip with effortless invention.

When Walt Whitman kept vigil beside the wounded and the dead, he did not write of victory or nation. He wrote of his feeling close, of a shared being.

In Song of Myself, he........

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