war_poetry | Felicity Currie, 'The quality of mercy'

The quality of mercy

Think dark. Dig deep. Now throw away the soil
That masks and marks the meanings we have lost:
Mass graves of wormy words. No flesh and blood -
Worn origins of speech, maimed skeletons
Of a species with a bastard progeny:
What's left of language. Prodigal, undead,
Not mute but mutant. How it twists and turns
To uncreate! We say not what we do.

Take mercy (having lost it). Take the trail
That leads abusers to a resurrected ghost.
The thing we killed may yet be understood -
Not felt, perhaps, by brute automatons,
But sensed as concept, essence, quality,
Like-whatness. Ghost with ghastly tale unsaid,
A word unmeant for kindness justly earns
The right to say its truth, if not to make it true.
"I have known what it is to be loved,
Cherished:
I am first-born. If meaning is lived,
Nourished,
As the scion whose sign spells the blood
Of the breed,
Those core values ingested as food
For a Creed,
I am worth your belief. More than good
I am goods.
Where's the mercy in merchandise, then?
Vanity!
I call merchants and mercenaries men -
Humanity.
Find a place where no pitiless barter
Flourished;
Or a time when no pitying martyr
Perished;
Or a word that could turn the world round
In a flash -
Changing goods into good, telling power
Of pity,
So that arms become alms and the poor
Run the City…
Merci! Give me my money's worth. My pound
Of flesh."

2

How rare to coin a word that finds us out,
That absolutely tells us as we are:
Creators of a language that can lie,
Letters to kill the spirit that gives life,
To spell the grossly human as humane -
Converting goods to good. Our crudest scam
Is mercy: now, as in its history.
For mercy has no pity; leaves no doubt
Our hearts are tangled in its roots. As far
As Latin takes us back to base, we try
In vain to conjure harmony from strife.
Somehow the Church chose mercy to explain
Commerce as pity: whether to bless or damn
The good of goods remains a mystery.

But why? Why?
How can we live and let the word lie
Counterfeit, sullied?
It's not as if a hellish void
Had to be harrowed for a reborn
Sanctified word:
The fifth Beatitude unheard
Unspoken, torn
From utterance, unmade
Unless mercy vouched it valid.
Jerome trusted
Misericordia, bonding the human heart
With pity. Why have we lost it?
The lost is not found if we start
From a coinage like mercy. They knew -
They must have known, those holy scholars -
The word was murky. Murky as hell.
False coin, cruel hire, rotten bribe, hard sell;
Pay as punishment, interest now due
In the currency that kills - mercy as dollars.

3

Shakespeare - you should be living at this hour:
To see a world that vindicates your choice
Of rampant, racist, mercenary power
As local habitation and as voice
For mercy. And the burning question's this:
"Which is the merchant here and which the Jew?"
This is to be or not to be - what is
And what is not. It's either me or you.
Which is the Jew and which the terrorist?
Who spits upon the Muslim gaberdine?
Who calls upon the godly to enlist
In dirty wars against those deemed unclean?

The quality of mercy's here to stay
In Gaza, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay…

And yet
There's something in these words that makes us yearn
To find a time, a culture and a home
That honour them in practice.
To forget
That language never works to make us learn
To live by any selfless paradigm.

The poetry holds.
The centre falls apart
As it is surely meant to, even in speech
That seems so lucid in its certainties.
Why such a melody? Why so much art
To woo a currish reprobate? To reach
A beast remote from human sympathies?
This 'mercy' isn't meant to turn a Jew
Into a kosher Christian.
Mockery.
The Jew's a hostage to the Christian need
To bless and sanctify the mercantile -
The good of goods, fair trade;
romantic argosies
That fleece uncultured distant shores for gold
"And many a purchas'd slave".
This sceptred isle,
This mercenary land, this gentile breed
Engenders profit free from usury.
God bless the myth of capital, the true
Blue blood of murder: mercy bought and sold.

4

If there is gentle rain, it falls upon
Contaminated ground: deaf ears and hearts
Of stone - yes!
Pitiful oxymoron
For humans made inhuman. And what hurts
Is how we find the words for callousness,
Cast them adrift as clichés with no bite.
Who gives a damn?
What's all the fuss about?
Slaughter of Innocents? Who could care less?
A plea for mercy hits the target when
That place, the place that hurts, is named and shamed:
Deaf ears and stony hearts of "temporal power".

Shakespeare turns
unbelievably, amazingly
From demonised murderous Jew
To "the mighty", the few
Who rage against the many -
heartbreakingly
Posits a superpower that can be tamed,
Might surrendered for 'mercy'. Every hour
Of time's potential butchery redeemed.
What then?

A tale, a different tale, told by a poet
(Idiot?)
Singing of mercy, pity, clemency
(Music of an eleison)
Where there is only sound and fury, still
And always signifying nothing.
"It is enthroned in the hearts of…"?
Let's start with Nero.
Seneca found him the model of clementia,
aged eighteen.
So merciful he wept to put his name
To the death warrant of two thieves.
"Would I had never learnt to write",
he sobbed
And wrote it.
(Jesus saved one thief upon the cross.)

You could say Seneca was not to know
His protégé might not turn out to be
The prototype of mercy. Even so
It would be comforting to think that he
Felt just a little queasy when he wrote
To justify (before a fussy senate)
The gory end of Nero's mother. Note:
Nothing survives to say he wept to pen it.

Not so for Shakespeare's merciful Queen Bess:
Left Mary Queen of Scots for twenty years
Plotting in prison.
Then, under duress
(No doubt), and mindful of the fears
Of her dear subjects,
finally got rid of her -
Sanctioned the murder
but withheld her signature.

5

Now we are graced by democratic tyrants,
Elected Neroes ratified by God
Corpsed by us in the flesh: Sharon and Bush.
The thing itself, immaculate, unst(r)ained -
The quality of mercy-killing.
Jew
And Christian in imperial harmony,
Showering their brand of gentle rain:
A global warring on the place beneath.
Iraq, twice blessed; lucky Afghanistan,
And biblically Judaic Palestine.

Poetry makes nothing happen. True.
A Jew like me still needs to have a bash.
I'll tell it straight. I'll lay it on the line.
It's time to ban
Commerce with Israel.
What god
Would ever have the chutzpah to bequeath
Another's land for pillage?
Hell's hegemony
Is rampant there, and we nod in compliance.

What role is there for clemency? What hope?
Shakespeare led me to Seneca. They share
This (crazed?) belief that mercy is conjoined
With power. That it has to be.
Let's see.
Give peace a chance. We've tried atrocity.

Vengeance, atrocity, savagery, madness.
Seneca's words
For a world where rulers do not
Show mercy.
Mercy is our word, our moneyed heir
To Seneca's clementia.
We've con-signed
Clemency (heartless conspiracy?)
To legalese or vagaries of weather,
If not to ignorant oblivion.
Now we need to remember our need
(In our want, our poverty, our meanness of spirit)
Of mercy as a word rich enough to express
The value of a good above all other.

Yes. Our mercy, Seneca's clementia,
Defines, as only language can,
The quality of humanity. The word
Is flesh, has substance. We are
But walking shadows.

In the dim light where shadows rule,
Through a glass darkly
We scan an argument for the sovereignty
Of mercy.
Mercy chooses life: freedom of choice
The letter of the law can never have,
Judging not by the letter (sub formula),
But what is fair and good.
Justice can never be threatened
By mercy.
How can one virtue undermine another?
The opposite of mercy is not law
But lawlessness. Barbarity, the power
That wields the sword because it fears it:
Pre-emptive violence, privilege
Of the axis of -

superior weaponry.

A merciful ruler is unafraid
To let his 'enemies' go unharmed -
Recognising that they have the right
To claim an honest cause: a fight
For just beliefs and equal liberty.
Imagine all the people living free
If our Nerotic Bush had given pause
Before decreeing 'terror' Uncaused Cause,
And claiming mandate from his friend in heaven
For boundless vengeance after 9/11.

A merciful ruler doesn't even need
To feel pity.
Seneca discards misericordiaA hard rain's a-gonna fall.

By Felicity Currie