Work Text:
[two poems from the poetry collection “Aay’han” (trans: bittersweet perfect moment of mourning and joy, remembering and celebrating)
by Anonymous]
Vod’ika
From the rain, from the rain,
vod wet from womb planet.
We send for another,
we send for another.
I take your hand, falling wet
from the birthing sacs,
and in it I place a blaster.
The placenta of your plastoid,
you paint the white out
with bursting glory colours.
I take up your body when it’s done
touch your rough palms
where we put death in your hands,
and I send for another.
Ret'urcye Mhi
To the body of the vod’ika
I say, “Ret'urcye mhi.”
They return to me,
wearing a familiar face
and still wet from Kamino.
They are one in a million;
they are one in a million dead.
*
[excerpt from: “The Utapau Remembrance Art Collection with Ro’vidaa” written by Meena Vrako for The Coruscant Star]
“It’s a wondrous collection,” Ro’vidaa tells our correspondent, “especially the poetry from the anonymous clone. It’s terrible to think what they almost went through, what almost happened to the whole Galaxy here in Utapau. To almost lose what autonomy they did have, and to come out the other side of it with such a radiant and hard-hitting viewpoint on the atrocities committed in the war. It’s astounding. It’s astounding to think anyone could go through what they have done — after everything that came out during Watergate, the awful conditions the clones grew up with in Kamino — and manage to wrap all those complicated feelings with such a stunning grasp of language and imagery… I would love to know what the Kaminoans think, about the men they made, who can create this with their hands, the hands they designed for death.”
And who does Ro’vidaa think our mysterious poet is? “We haven’t seen their work before,” she tells us, “it’s an entirely new voice. We think it must be one of the clones who were in command before the deconstruction of the GAR because of the intense sense of guilt that permeates the poetry. Whoever it is, though, I hope we see more of them in the coming years. Aay’han was a beautiful debut, the galaxy’s poets will be waiting for the next from our beloved Anonymous.”
*
[one poem from the poetry collection “Aay’han” by Anonymous]
Kamino
I take the tubies by the hand
and lead them from the nursery
where the machines sit
leaking false-milk from metal nipples,
and I take them to the room
where the defectives go.
I tell them this is where they go to die.
I do not say die, there is no death here,
there is only rebirth.
Decommission , I say. Melted to slag , I say.
I see on their little faces that they think
they are made of lost vod’e
that they are made of defectives who
became plastoid and skin and genes reborn.
I cannot tell them they are wrong,
I do not know.
Ori’vod, they call me, huddled about my feet
outside the room where the ones I couldn’t save
are melting into body-slurry.
What is it, that I wish they were old enough,
what is it, that I wish war would come on faster feet?
It is cowardice, maybe.
I’ll save you, vod’ika , I say. And maybe I will,
some of them.
*
There are stains on his desk from tea, the crescent moon shapes of the bottoms of cups. Obi-Wan is standing by the window, looking down into the Temple gardens. Cody would write a poem about it if it wouldn’t get him clocked by the entire 212 th and all his batchmates as Anonymous, he knows that Fox has gone to hear at least some of it at the Utapau Remembrance, not that he likes poetry enough to really listen to it, luckily . As it is, he writes it with his finger tip on the edge of the desk, invisible letters, his eyes on Obi-Wan’s back.
The Temple rooms are hollow bells , he writes on the wood, his fingertip dancing through Basic, scrunching up the letters so tight that even if it left a mark it would never be legible, filled with the invisible sound of the Force, it must be beautiful to hear it, as I heard it once, when the Force stayed my hand, I see it anyway in the lax slope of his shoulders, and the smile, and the sound of the birds, and the smell of tea, and the scattered projects about his room that say nothing of numbers or brothers or missives of war in far off worlds, I see the Force in the look he casts back at me, and the —
“Cody, you really are thinking too hard,” says Obi-Wan. “Drink your tea.”
Cody smiles, sips at the tea, and scrapes out the remainder of the words on the bottom of the cup as he lifts it to his lips. The crescent moons of teacups stain his desk, it reminds me of home. It’s a shit poem, bulky and self-absorbed and grossly sappy. “Obi-Wan, I think I should buy you coasters,” he says, thumbing the edge of a stain. It’s strange that it almost makes him want to cry, that he is Cody and he can think of buying coasters for a good friend and the Temple is quiet and calm and good.
*
Fox is in Utapau because someone had to be and it would normally be Cody — always acting the ori’vod to the point of buir-hood — but Cody hadn’t wanted to go, either because he wasn’t a fan of poetry and art and mirshepar'la [boring, lit: brain devouring] speeches by Senators who really should be savvy in politics enough to know when they were losing the crowd, or because this was the place he’d almost killed his General, Fox didn’t know. Cody had been disgustingly vague when Fox had tried to contact him about the clone presence requested at the Remembrance. (Not that it mattered, Fox was happy to get away from Coruscant, he could still feel the darjetii like a stain there.)
The crowd are holding candles as they file into the town square below and waving at him as they pass, he had been forced to stand in the box with some Senators and Sergeant Hound who had come along, it seemed, just to try and convince Fox that he needed to make a speech. “Come on,” he was whispering, elbowing Fox, “you’ve got dressed up all smart so you might as well get on the stage.”
“Hound, I will personally see to it that you get sent to dig latrine trenches for Hutts if you don’t shut your kriffing trap,” Fox says in a low, flat tone. “I’m not here to make —”
Someone on the stage coughs into the microphone. “Welcome to the annual Utapau Remembrance, for the lives lost in the last, crucial moments of the war, and all the lives lost before that,” she says. “I am Ro’vidaa, poetry critic and one of the organisers of the event. I’d like to start with a poem, written by an anonymous clone who fought our battles for us when the nights were darkest. This is Utapau .”
What she reads Fox almost cannot hear over the trembling of his heart. Hound falls silent too and when Fox glances over, he sees that the vod is crying. They were never here, stuck back in Coruscant with their minds already sliding into darkness, but the pain of the vod’e is pain felt by all, it seems too familiar now, to his own experiences in the Guard. He had thought, perhaps stupidly, that the war had been markedly different for him and the rest of the Corries; it had, of course, but the feeling , little gods the feeling is like a shared heartbeat. It’s startlingly, wonderfully familiar.
In the stifling quiet that follows the poem, Hound leans into Fox’s side and says, “When we go back to Coruscant, we’re taking a copy of that home.”
Fox can only agree. (When the service is done, Utapau is not even his favourite. He buys many copies of the collection, the money that goes straight to those who need it most, and he carries it home with him to Coruscant.)
*
[one poem from the poetry collection “Aay’han” by Anonymous]
Utapau
We fight hand-to-hand with the clankers.
We do not even need to think,
this is not second-nature, this is first -nature.
We fall from the birthing sac
with a gun in our soft hands.
We circle the whirling strips of light,
our jetiise , our centre-points.
We do not even need to think, but we do.
We are thinking, we are thinking all the time,
we are all thinking as one.
We are thinking of what dikut clanker story
we will pull from the blood-loss of today,
we are thinking not of ourselves but the backs of our vod’e
and the backs of our jetiise ;
we move as constant shields,
just looking for the sacrificial moment,
knowing we would take it every time.
And then it goes blank, and I am I.
There is no we . I stand for a moment,
all the other vod’e stand.
I let brothers fall, I let Jedi fall,
to the oncoming droid fire
I raise my blaster to the back —
the back I have been watching,
perhaps that has always been part of the code
— and inside I am nothing
I am no thought
I am no nature
I am no man
I feel the sick dark coming.
I raise, I raise —
A rushing warmth, a voice, a Force.
Everything sings, hollow bells.
I wake, we wake.
The dead are at our feet
and the living with kyr’am chaar [death fear]
in their eyes, gazing on us.
We lay down the blasters,
we do not even need to think.
*
They are squished into the semi-circle booth at 79s, elbow-to-elbow with each other like they used to sleep on Kamino. Bly sips his drink, watching Cody and Fox needle each other and give each other osik. They’re always like this, it’s comforting to watch. It reminds Bly of the good bits of being a tubie, the wrestling and the butchering Mando’a, and Wolffe biting him hard on the arm (he still has the scar, Wolffe still apologises for it every time he sees it). Rex is even bending himself backwards trying to get Cody’s attention, like the good old days, not that they were particularly good days, by anyone’s standard definition.
“Cody,” Rex is saying, “Cody, Cody, Cody.”
But Cody is locked in a staring match with Fox, both of them frozen like stalking predators, waiting to strike. They used to get like this on Kamino, when they were fighting over the top marks in every possible metric. They used to claw at each other more than any of the rest of them, Bly thinks it explains both of their fucked up psyches more than either of them would admit. Then Fox shakes himself, reminding Bly that they’re no longer shinies who brawl with each other, and says, “I have gifts for you all from Utapau.”
Cody rolls his eyes. “You’re getting soft in your old age, Foxy.”
“Fuck Utapau,” Rex says, but he’s twitching all over like an over-excited puppy. Bly shares a fond, exasperated look with Wolffe. “What did you bring back?”
“You’re already acting ungrateful,” says Fox sniffily, but he pulls a bag out from under the table and slams it down. “Help yourself.”
Rex launches forwards immediately and so does Bly, because he can admit to himself that he likes gifts. He likes gifts a whole lot more than Cody and Wolffe, anyway, who both act like martyrs who don’t need any material love. “ Poetry , vod ?” Bly asks, incredulous. “Cody’s right, you are going soft.”
“It’s by a clone,” Fox says, defensively, “it’s quite good, actually. For poetry. It made Sergeant Hound cry at the service.”
“Clones can’t write poetry,” Cody scoffs, he hasn’t reached for the bag and is instead squinting across 79s like he’s looking for someone, “we weren’t made for art.”
Fox is glaring at him again. “Kote, don’t be a pretentious dikut . Maybe you can’t write poetry, but this vod can.”
“I —” Cody barks a strange little laugh. “Forget it, Fox. Give my copy to someone else, I don’t want it.”
“Take the gift,” says Fox, really frowning now.
Bly looks between them, startled by their sudden shift from childish playfulness to childish tension.
“It’s lovely, Fox,” says Wolffe, “I was sorry I had to miss the Remembrance.”
“Yes, well,” says Fox, not looking at Wolffe and still glaring at Cody, “I had to bring you something back. Especially this. It’s — I didn’t realise that the experience on Utapau and what was happening with the Guard felt so similar, the sickness of the darjetii. It was — It felt less lonely.” He doesn’t take his eyes off Cody the whole time he says it.
Cody’s face has fallen into that familiar wooden look that Bly hasn’t seen in so long, that look that says he’s feeling guilty about something, something he probably shouldn’t feel that way about. “Drop it, Fox,” he snaps.
Rex, slinging Wolffe and Bly desperate looks like they can do anything about an incoming Cody/Fox tussle, starts reading doggedly from the book of poetry, “ We fight hand-to-hand with the clankers. // We do not even need to think, // this is not second-nature, this is first-nature —” And then he stops. And he reads in silence.
Fox reaches across Cody to slap at Rex. “ Vod , you can’t just read a few lines, give us the whole thing.”
Rex just keeps reading, flipping the page to what Bly can see is a new poem. Cody looks suddenly very ill and pale, Bly thinks, perhaps he should get Fox to leave him alone. “Cody,” says Rex, looking up slowly.
“Don’t,” says Cody, shortly.
Bly is on Kamino, in a moment. Cody is taking his job as ori’vod very seriously, strutting up and down in front of the new batch of shinies. They are very young, he and Cody and Fox and the rest, he thinks perhaps the shinies are Rex’s batch though they’re such a memory-blur that he can’t see much except Cody’s proud expression. Cody is lecturing, in the memory. Cody is saying, “Your blaster should not be second-nature, it should be first —”
“Kote,” Bly says. “You wrote this?” He snaps his own copy open and starts reading the first one it opens to: Ret'urcye Mhi, it’s called, and it’s instantly familiar; Bly doesn’t know how, something about the cadence or the guilt he knows like the back of his hand that his (only slightly older) ori’vod carries with him everywhere he goes, that Bly feels echoed in his own bones.
He glances up. Cody is stone-faced, flushed with embarrassment. Fox’s mouth has fallen open.
“You should have said,” says Wolffe, sounding distraught, “I would have tried harder to get time off work if I’d known you were —”
“I didn’t want anyone to know,” says Cody after a beat of quiet. “It’s — it’s kriffing embarrassing, alright?”
“You think our lives are embarrassing?” Fox snaps.
“No, I think I’m embarrassing.”
“You aren’t,” says Fox. “Kriffing hells, Cody, it wasn’t just Hound you made cry. Everyone was, the whole service, I was crying. You —”
“Stop it, Fox.”
“I’m only telling you the truth. Were you ever going to tell us the truth?”
Cody is staring woodenly up at the ceiling.
Bly groans. “Cody, vod , this is good. You’re good. You’re a — a generational talent, and we’ve only got one generation to be a talent in, so you must be the most talented clone that will ever exist.”
“Bly, shut up.”
“Bly’s right,” says Wolffe, reading his own copy. “You’re good.”
“Fox, I can’t believe you didn’t notice this was Cody,” Rex says, dropping the book on the table, “I mean, for kark’s sake he spends a whole poem talking about tea. Only a vod in love with General Kenobi would —”
“I am not in love with —”
“We can debate all you want about how good your poetry is,” says Fox snidely, “but do not attempt to convince us you don’t love your jetii, Cody, we’ve known ever since you got assigned to him.”
Cody drops his head down onto the table so loud some people over at the packed bar turn around to look. “I hate all of you.”
“No you don’t,” says Rex, grinning. “My brother, the famous poet! Gods, can you sign my copy?”
“No,” Cody says emphatically, echoing against the table. “Absolutely not. This is why I didn’t want —”
“Codes,” Rex says, grabbing his shoulder. “I’m not messing with you. This is brilliant. It’s — it’s us, you’ve made us —”
“— real,” Wolffe finishes for him, “you’ve made us into something real.”
“They read out every single one of your poems throughout the Remembrance,” Fox says, suddenly, “they didn’t do that for any of the other collections. Just yours. I saw a review in The Coruscant Star yesterday that said the galaxy would be ‘awaiting your next —’”
“Fox, shut up.” Cody sits up, finishes off his drink. “I get it, you — you all like it. Love it,” he corrects, wincing, as they glare at him, “I — Thank you. That’s very — that’s very kind of you. It wasn’t — I just —”
“It’s alright,” says Bly. “We won’t tell anyone else, well except for the rest of our batch and I’ll probably tell Aayla because I have a really hard time lying to her.”
Cody snorts. “Great.” He shakes his head. “I don’t mind, not really,” he says, gruffly. “I don’t mind that you know, I don’t mind if anyone knows. It’s just — it’s just that telling you would have killed me from embarrassment. I think I would have rather someone shot me at Utapau.”
Fox laughs and grabs him round the shoulders. “You are a kriffing utreekov , Cody. Stay and have another drink, don’t run off just because we’ve found out your secret, Rex will cry if he doesn’t get your attention for an hour or so.”
“Hey,” Rex reproaches, though neither Cody nor Fox seem to hear him, glaring at each other again with that still, predatory playfulness.
Bly exchanges a look with Wolffe, fond again. We weren’t made for art, Cody’s voice echoes in his head, what a fool: all hands are made for art.
*
[one poem from the poetry collection “Aay’han” by Anonymous]
Between Orders
We peel open ration packs
hoping each time for something new,
the water tastes old and filtered and re-filtered
and filtered again.
The ship groans as she hits hyperspace,
and we count the missions in tea-leaves
from far-off star systems.
We shake out the brew from the last mission,
and we steep it long enough that the flavour is strong,
over-powering, and the smell fills us up,
fills the ship up, until the bland ration packs
are only stardust and a bad tome’tayl [memory].
We stand with the tea in our cold hands
and the paint on our standardised armour
soaking up the spice-flower smell from the steam.
First-nature: I think the boiling water a weapon,
I ready myself for the certain moment of “ contact! ”
Second-nature: I savour. I stand. I breathe.
I drink tea, from far-off places.
*
Rex walks home with Cody, keeping to the safer thoroughfares. They’re not so drunk that they’re stumbling, but the polluted sky is a swimming pool of destabilising grey above. Cody’s book of poetry is on the inside pocket of his civvies jacket. “Cody, you really, really love him, don’t you?”
Cody, to his credit, does not ask who he means, just nods and doesn’t look at him.
“I think you should tell him,” Rex confides, rolling into Cody’s shoulder tipsily as they walk. “I think you should drink tea together and be happy.”
Cody says, “Do you really think that — do you really think my poetry makes the vod’e real?”
He frowns drunkenly over the non sequitur and then says, “Yes. Cody, no-one could understand how we feel. There is…” He waves a hand. “Disconnect. You —” He brings his hands together, interlocks his fingers. “— made a bridge.”
Cody casts an amused look his way. “You’re drunk.”
“I’m right. And I’m right about your jetii.”
“Sure,” says Cody.
“You should at least give him a copy,” he says, patting his chest where the book is nestled by his lungs and heart, just where Cody always will be, “and tell him it’s you.”
Cody doesn’t say anything more, but he’s smiling as they walk home.
*
Inscription: Obi-Wan, for all the tea that made me feel like a real person; I wrote this for my vod’e but you made me — us, the vod’e — feel infinite with possibilities, my cyare. Cody.