Pictures of War
Sept 14 2008


In pictures of war
the victims go nameless,
and less and less are they warriors.
Lost children
on pencil-thin legs.
Young mothers,
clasping listless babies
to withered breasts.
And old men,
who are no longer a threat to anyone.

How does he feel,
observing life
under glass,
his eye attached
to the camera’s narrow aperture?
Does he think about focus
depth
the effect of light and shadow?
Or is it cold sweats
adrenaline
the fear of death?
Or has he convinced himself he’s exempt —
his white well-fed body
set apart,
his noble cause
somehow protecting him?

Or is he overwhelmed by so much suffering?
Shoving it down
into drugged demonic dreams;
diluting it
with warm beer, cheap Scotch,
along with the other foreign correspondents
who gather after hours
in crumbling hotel bars.

He re-enters the known world
with his prize-winning shots
bearing witness,
and still, the war won’t stop
— all the fleeting moments
his auto-shutter caught;
his collection of subjects,
unaware
anonymous.
And now, how many merely broken,
how many dead and gone?

In another age, they might have feared
his pictures were stealing their souls.
And perhaps he did;
because the way that memory tortures him
their suffering souls still live.



This poem was inspired by a powerful radio documentary I heard on the CBC show Ideas. It was a collage of interviews with various photojournalists who had risked their lives in war zones. They reflected on many things, including their sense of helplessness and responsibility; the damage to family life; their feelings of fatalism and fear and – surprisingly – freedom; and the persisting psychological harm of the horrible events they’ve witnessed. Anyway, I’ve tried to capture some of that here. /B