New Yorker Poem

War and Peace

Chana Bloch

I made a big wish on the evening star,
Venus, or was it Mars,
but it was a low-flying plane
headed east.

I saw the little foxes on the hillside
with their pointy red ears;
up close, a fallen branch of autumn.

When the guide clapped his hands,
the brilliant apples on the tree got frightened
and flew away.

The marriage I called Gibraltar
went down like a ship
scraping the rocky strait.

I thought the war would bring peace.
The road signs all said
This Way to the Future, so we ran out
with flag and shovel, elated, planting—

This poem is very attention-grabbing. This is not just because the title is equivalent to that of an exasperatingly long novel. The reason this poem grabs attention is because it is an exact representation of how some things are not always as they seem and how this can lead to unforeseen consequences. This is first revealed when the author makes a few simple first-sight mistakes such as thinking a plane was a star and a branch with red and orange leaves was actually a group of foxes. Then we reach a section where a guide claps his hands and the apples the author sees on the tree near them fly away. This is clearly another sight error, as apples can't fly, but there's something that separates this event from the other two. Birds are sometimes used as symbols of peace in nature (doves, for instance) and with a title like War and Peace, it only seems fitting that this event resembles a foreshadowing of events to follow involving the human race as a whole. The poem then goes on to describe how a marriage, called Gibraltar, had ended. While not being related to sight, this passage still continues to follow the same pattern as the other lines in that the marriage would be supposedly called Gibraltar for the region's beauty. However, the name ends up being applied after the marriage ends prematurely due to the notoriously rocky strait (which was clearly not the original intention of the name). The poem then ends on a cliffhanger who's conclusion can be accurately inferred based on this pattern of the unwanted being unexpected and occurring and with the previous phrase 'I thought the war would bring peace'. The inferred ending is that, while everyone thought claiming land would allow the human race to grow into the future, it only ended up causing halts to beneficial technological progress because of the wars over specific areas of land. This wraps up the poem quite nicely and brings the whole point of the poem into the big picture of the entire human race.