Drones Put Heaven in a Rage

Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre

Recently there have been a couple of significant developments in America’s very troubling drone program. First, a judge has ruled that there must be more transparency about who is targeted for drone attacks and why. Then, the Obama administration said that it was moving drone operations from the CIA to the Pentagon, where the program will be more subject to oversight and military rules of engagement.

But regulated or not, we should not forget what drones represent, which is our unending development of evermore destructive weapons of war. Here’s an old poem by my father protesting machines that have been built “to climb and hover/Stoop and kill.” The poem begins with an allusion to William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”: “A robin redbreast in a cage/Puts all heaven in a rage.” (This is the poem that begins “To see a world in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower.”) My father is an ardent bird lover–thus his protest about what farmers sometimes do with hawks they fear are hunting their chickens–and his reference to “class of ’45” is to his being a World War II veteran who was appalled when the United Stated dropped the atom bomb. (Read my post about that here.)

The poem fantasizes bringing down a classic statue celebrating war.

Hawks
By Scott Bates

A hawk in a cage
Puts Heaven in a rage
Is a broken thing
A broken wing

A Hawk in the air
Is a kind of god
An upper edge
Of mind and wind

When I think of
All the Hawks that Men
Have jailed or
Crucified on barns

And of all the various
Machines they’ve built
To climb and hover
Stoop and kill

I Bird Watcher
Class of ’45
Watching here
Between death and love

With a Hawk’s shadow
On all I love
I am inclined
I say to move

To Paris with
An Anarchist
A small bomb
And two bottles of beer

And before the Guardians’
Caged eyes
Kick Winged Victory
Downstairs