Sheer greatness
 

I trust everyone will joint me in saluting this timely, tender, and touching poem, an elegy for Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi.

‘REPORTS OF MY SURVIVAL MAY BE EXAGGERATED’
BY ALAN JENKINS

How can you be lying there?
Immodestly, among the rubble
When we want you to be here
In some other kind of trouble –

Luffing up, in irons, perhaps,
Just downstream from the Dove,
Lost in South London, without maps,
Or capsized in love.

What’s keeping you? A kind of dare?
Come back and tell us how you stayed
One step ahead, how you gave fear
The slip, how you were not afraid –

As we are. Look – here’s my idea.
Come back – this time, for good.
Leave your flak jacket and your gear
In that burnt-out neighbourhood,

And fly home, via Paris. You’ll be met.
I’ll buy a bottle from the corner store,
Like old times. You can have a cigarette.
Marie, get up off that bloodstained floor!

****

Tonight you threw your thin brown arm
Around my shoulders, and you said
(There was this unearthly calm)
‘Can’t you take in that I am dead?

Learn to expect the unexpected turn
Of the tide, the unmarked reef,
The rock that should be off the stern
On which we come to grief?

The lies, the ignorance and hate –
The bigger picture? No safe mooring there,
In Chechnya or Chiswick Eyot.
Those nights I drank my way out of despair,

And filling ashtrays filed the copy
You would read – or not read – with
A brackish taste and your first coffee
Contending on your tongue; while Billy Smith,

My street cat rescued from Jerusalem,
Barged in, shouting, from his wars….
As many lives as his – and now I’ve used them.
I wish I’d made it back to yours.’

Illiterate that I am, I didn’t know he could write so well.

Thank you for posting this wonderful poem, Sam.

I understood that this was an elegy for Marie Colvin. Are you re-dedicating it, Sam?

An excellent elegy, quite moving. I just listened to a reading of the poem. I don't know if Jenkins is the reader himself or someone else.

https://soundcloud.com/pbsnewshour/r...y-alan-jenkins

It sounds as if it could be Alan, though I have only heard him read once. Marie died in 2011 and at the time, Alan said:

Shortly after Marie Colvin was killed in Homs the Sunday Times called me and asked if I would be trying to write anything for or about her. No, no, I protested, it was far too soon, too early even for grief; I was in shock. In the small hours of that night I woke with a start of deep shame at what Marie would have thought of my maidenly blushes. Over the next few days and nights I wrote a poem I called “Reports of My Survival May be Exaggerated” – Marie’s words on a Facebook update posted a day or so before her death, when, having filed her ST report from Babr Amr and got safely out, she decided to go back in, to witness the next stage of Assad’s war on his own people. Reporting wars was, after all, what she did. Writing poems is, after all, what I am supposed to do.

Am I missing something here?

It was republished recently in connection with Kashoggi's death. Perhaps this is what Sam saw, or something similar?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/po...bered-in-verse