"Curfew": Juxtaposition of Peace and War

Curfew Paraphrase

Bats take to the air once the sun sleeps,

and snakes fill the ponds behind 

crumbled buildings. the mosques’ doors

open for their initiates, inviting the night stars light 

as a mantra.

This day the police caught rays instead of men,

and children put clothes out to dry with

their mothers, while warm wind

embraced them. 

The air did not crack nor the the ground shake, calm. 

Sgt. Gutierrez didn’t hold a dying man with

pieces of cerebrum held tight in hand; today doves

flew from the Tigris with peace, not by fright. 

Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet was the child of his experience in Iraq as a platoon leader. Many times he would write a poem after a raid or by flashlight in his barracks after a day on the field. In “Curfew,” Turner does not turn away from gore. Instead, he embraces it with strong imagery that allows the reader to almost feel the brains of a shot friend. Turner does not sugar coat the atrocities of war, but he presents war as it is. He uses symbolism throughout as a subtle reminder of what humanity is capable of doing, on extremes of peace and violence. “Curfew,” juxtaposes peace and violence, and by doing so, it instills in the reader an understanding of war’s reality.

“Curfew” describes a scene in a war zone that is lit by the warm rays of sunlight and the calming tendrils of moonlight, not pyres of war. However, violence is not absent from the poem. In its three stanzas, “Curfew” juxtaposes a serene scene with the memory of death and violence to develop a spectrum of emotion. The first stanza speaks of nature and natural things in a peaceful tone: “bats fly,” “water snakes glide,” and “moonlight” is “prayer.” In the following stanza “policemen sunbathed on traffic islands” and “children helped their mothers / string clothes to the line” while “a slight breeze [was] filling them with heat.” This furthers the imagery of the ideal, homey scene, but this does not last. The final stanza speaks of what is not happening today. Sergeant Gutierrez is not holding an injured man who was grasping chunks from his friends’ brain. The introduction of this traumatic image shows how even on a peaceful day, the memory of war and violence persists.

Throughout Here, Bullet Turner presents violence and gore in their rawest forms, just as he does in “Curfew.” For example, his poem “Autopsy” details the initial incisions that the coroner makes when performing an autopsy on a downed soldier. Violence and gore are perhaps the best way to describe war, for they are its most common products. Many times war is portrayed as protecting those at the homeland or preventing further violence from happening, an necessary and honorable action, and those committing the acts are brought to the status of heroes. Turner, however, presents the facts as they are; people lose lives, and body parts of victims are often strewn on the streets. Too often have sergeants, captains, and colonels held their men dying in their arms, as in the last stanza of “Curfew.” 

What makes this poem beautiful and a poem of hope is the symbolism which it uses. “Curfew” establishes a scene of peace with descriptive details and imagery, but it goes even further with the symbolism used throughout. The police bathing in the sun stands for a time when such men are no longer needed in the world, for everyone will live at peace with each other. White birds often stand for doves, a commonly known symbol for peace, which it may stand for in this poem. Right after the image of Sergeant Gutierrez holding a dying man is mentioned, Turner says that “instead, white birds rose from the Tigris.” The Tigris pushes the idea of peace symbolism to the state of an ideal: the Garden of Eden. It is believed by many that the Garden of Eden existed between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present day Iraq. By mentioning the Tigris along with the white birds Turner establishes his belief that men can someday reclaim that peaceful state.

Brian Turner’s “Curfew” holds no rhyme or consistent meter. The only formal element which I could find is the poem’s three stanza structure with a quintain at the beginning and the end with a quatrain stuck in the middle. The longer quintain forces the reader to stay on the subject portrayed slightly longer than stanzas of shorter length. Turner uses this to make the reader linger on the peace imagery for awhile, soaking it up. The middle quatrain further saturates the reader in peace, but also transitions the reader to the last quintain where the violent images fester. 

Turner uses imagery, symbolism, and stanza length in “Curfew” to give the reader an idealized image of peace juxtaposed with a very real image of the atrocities of war. Turner’s experience with was is well articulated through his poetry, and “Curfew” is a prime example of this.