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TJMF Publishing - Open Mike Cafe Editor's Desk Staff Editor Patty Zion |
April 12th
The Orderlies by Ron Wallace
Outside the Black Horse Tavern
lie mounds and piles of mutilation,
arms and legs,
taken with all the speed,
that exhausted men can muster.
Sometimes the chloroform works fine,
sometimes it’s not enough,
and the bloody saw must do as best it can.
Staunch the flow, bind the stump,
toss the limb onto the pile like cord wood
for the fire,
lift up the shattered form,
and to the amputation table, bring
another damaged man.
Where is Lee, and where is Meade
when the dragon must be fed?
They’re never here to wade the blood with me.
They never hear the screams
or smell the reek of gaping wounds
created by their strategies.
They’re never here to hold the fighters down
while saw blades bite through bone.
See that hand extended
from off that sickening pile?
Reaching up in supplication to a bright July,
It almost seems alive
still wears its wedding band.
You’ll find no stars on any shoulders
when I cut that ring free.
No, they’ll be somewhere else
bent over maps, waging war on paper,
but come tomorrow,
they’ll send me more arms, more legs
to saw and cut and hack,
and from this hell, new heaps of ruination rise
until we stack them to the sky.
The Orderlies nearly defies description, as medics in the Civil War tell all, painting a gruesome scene of bodies torn apart by war. The reader cannot escape until the last line is completed, with yet another deadly image – bodies stacked almost to the heavens.
Strengths:
The intensity of this free verse poem comes, in great part, from the voice. Hawk has wisely chosen a person very close to the carnage – the orderly – to deliver this message, and he relates it as it is happening. We are in the present tense, which adds to the inescapable feeling. The words carry the bitterness, fear, and even rage at the generals who carefully plan the devastation.
Line breaks serve Hawk’s purpose well, as he places the most telling words at the ends of lines: mutilation, legs, muster, stump, wood, fire, screams, wounds, bone. He also sets the end of each stanza in the spot where the speaker would take a quick breath before setting in again on his tirade. And the final line is masterfully set apart for emphasis of its sad story.
Hawk takes a stand in this poem. We have no doubt about the orderlies’ opinion on the war.
There is a masculine cadence to the words – not a strict meter, but rather a sense that we are moving along, with the voice carrying us in a steady, unrelenting path to the completion of the thoughts.
Suggested areas for improvement:
The poem has little need for improvement, but after careful searching, I found a few small matters. There is a problem with verb tense in this section:
they’ll send me more arms, more legs
to saw and cut and hack,
and from this hell, new heaps of ruination rise
Since the sentence begins with will send, I suggest ending it with
new heaps of ruination will rise.
This does change the cadence slightly, so another alternative would be to start a new sentence with the word New, like this:
New heaps of ruination rise
until we stack them to the sky.
This line carried my mind away from the scene temporarily:
when I cut that ring free.
I found myself wondering about the ring and why it would be cut free, and therefore was a bit distracted.
This comma is not needed:
taken with all the speed{,}
Most powerful phrases:
They’re never here to wade the blood with me. A memorable line, which also happens to be in perfect iambic pentameter meter. Just a coincidence, I’m sure, but still it has tremendous impact, partly due to this rhythm as well as the wrenching imagery.
while saw blades bite through bone. Here, Hawk employs alliteration using the b sound, which emits a feeling of anger, almost as though the speaker is spitting the words.
they’ll send me more arms, more legs
to saw and cut and hack, This is a perfect example of synecdoche, a poetic device which uses the part to represent the whole. And, gruesome though it may be, the device is skillfully employed here.
The Orderlies pulls the reader through the atrocities of the battlefield, employing professional poetic skill and devices. This poem clearly accomplishes all it intends to do, and will find a well-deserved place in Hawk’s volume of Civil War writings. Congratulations, and thank you, Hawk.
Patty Zion, Staff Editor