Editor’s note: War leaves its traces not only on the battlefields but also in the minds of those who are sent to observe them. Statistics and reports can map the contours of armed violence, but they rarely capture the private reverberations that endure long after the news cycle has moved on. Sometimes, poetry does. The poem that follows was written by journalist Patrick Howse whose professional life took him to Iraq, Gaza, and the West Bank, and later back to London’s New Broadcasting House. In publishing it, Action on Armed Violence recognises that testimony comes in many forms. NBH is both a personal document and a universal one: an attempt to distil how the experience of war travels across places and years, and how bearing witness can never be entirely set aside.
Patrick Howse
Conflicts in the Middle East played a big part in my career as a BBC Newsgathering producer. I covered the Iraq War for the whole time British troops were directly involved (2003-2009), and was also a frequent visitor to the Israel/Palestine conflict, which took me to the West Bank and Gaza Strip as far back as 2002. The following poem was written after I had stopped covering wars, and was figuring out what to do next. I spent some time in 2013 working in the BBC’s radio newsroom, and found myself having to write the story of Lee Rigby’s murder when his killer was convicted in December that year. I was working on the hourly short summaries that go out on BBC radio outlets – and had to find different ways to say that the soldier had been beheaded in broad daylight repeatedly throughout my long shift.
It brought back vivid and intrusive impressions of disturbing experiences I had witnessed directly in Rafah, where I was shot at by the Israeli army while covering house demolitions, and Baghdad where I had some close encounters with horrific inter-communal violence. I had been through a spell of PTSD, three years earlier, and was triggered by the Lee Rigby story.
Journalists must primarily be witnesses and recorders of events – but they are also participants, whether they like it or not.
NBH stands for New Broadcasting House, the BBC’s headquarters in London. Green is the colour of Hamas.
NBH
Playful stones thrown
By small children
Bounce harmlessly
Off our armoured backs.
Now bullets skip
In the ruins
Of the freshly
Flattened homes,
And a tree stands
Alone among the
Concrete rubble,
Growing green.
* * * *
I’m running by the river
That watered Eden;
Its reeds whisper
Of Babylon.
A body is dragged up the
Stone embankment;
It leaves a wet
Brown stain behind;
It stares to heaven, looking
In vain for mercy,
A round hole drilled
In its forehead.
* * * *
Hour after hour I find
New ways to say
The soldier’s head
Was hacked off.
London, December 2013
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