Losses

by Andrew Motion

General Petraeus, when the death-count of American troops
in Iraq was close to 3,800, said ‛The truth is you never do get
used to losses. There is a kind of bad news vessel with holes,

and sometimes it drains, then it fills up, then it empties again’—
leaving, in this particular case, the residue of a long story
involving one soldier who, in the course of his street patrol,

tweaked the antenna on the TV in a bar hoping for baseball,
but found instead the snowy picture of men in a circle talking,
all apparently angry and perhaps Jihadists. They turned out to be

reciting poetry. ‛My life’, said the interpreter, ‛is like a bag of flour
thrown through wind into empty thorn bushes’. Then ‛No, no’, he said,
correcting himself. ‛Like dust in the wind. Like a hopeless man.’

Andrew Motion, “Losses” from Coming In To Land: Selected Poems 1975—2015. Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Motion.