Hal G.P. Colebatch: Two Poems

To Khaled al-Asaad

Khaled al-Asaad, aged 81, a renowned Syrian antiquities scholar, was publicly beheaded on August 18, 2015, by the Islamic State in the ancient city of Palmyra, apparently after he refused to reveal where valuable artifacts were hidden which IS intended to destroy.

Auden wrote to the effect

That all his anti-Nazi poems

Had not saved one Jew.

So I feel now the futility

Of words against pure evil.

Words are not needed.

Needed are large numbers

Of well-trained infantry,

Artillery, tanks and aircraft.

And yet, if civilization

And a martyrdom for civilization

Mean anything

We cannot rule out words.

And it was for civilization

That this old man died

At the hands of savages.

A death that showed

With chemical purity, evil,

Under the naked sky,

That cast its light and showed

That island of civilization washed

By the encircling

Sea of Darkness.

“Martyr” means “witness”,

And this man dying in that sea

Of blackest evil

Left a blazing memory of pure light,

A memory to radiate its light forever.

And perhaps, perhaps, words

May do the humble work

Of memory against forgetting.

Lewis asked: what was

The moral worth of culture?

His own answers did not satisfy him

But here perhaps

Is the hint of an explanation.

The cliché is true

Without words and heroes

We are lost.

Hal G.P. Colebatch

Adolescent diary rediscovered

What emotional storms,

It seems,

Raged round the bearers of these

Sets of mysterious initials,

Whose full names

I no longer remember.

Hal G.P. Colebatch