Robert Bly (b. 1926) wrote a good many poems against the Vietnam War: some vast and prophetic, like “The Teeth-Mother Naked at Last,” some short and didactic, many frequently anthologized. Of the shorter poems, none is quite so fruitfully compressed as “Counting Small-Boned Bodies,” a brief, ragingly sardonic fantasia on the notion of “body count,” a phrase heard every night during those years on radio and television, to the point that it seemed a shorthand for war itself, though a shorthand designed to erase the means by which living beings became countable bodies. Bly’s poem reanimates the phrase, extrapolates it to its absurd conclusion, and turns the phrase’s logic against the war that brought it into prominence.
Bly grew up in Minnesota, enlisted in the Navy in 1944, went to Harvard; early in his career he translated and promoted the work of poets then largely unknown in the English-speaking world, including Pablo Neruda, with whom he felt a particular affinity. A prolific writer of prodigious energy, he was also a prominent poetic opponent of the Vietnam War, cofounding American Writers Against the Vietnam War, signing the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest pledge, and donating the National Book Award given him for The Light Around the Body (1967), in which “Counting Small-Boned Bodies” first appeared, to draft-resistance organizations. In 1975 he organized the first Great Mother Conference—still held every year—believing that an exploration of “the divine feminine” was needed as antidote to the unbalanced, pathological masculinism that had led to war. Later, in Iron John (1990), he became a sort of Jungian guru of American manhood; the book was a surprise bestseller, making him famous in a way that none of his poetry had.
Let’s count the bodies over again.
If we could only make the bodies smaller,
The size of skulls,
We could make a whole plain white with skulls in the moonlight!
If we could only make the bodies smaller,
Maybe we could get
A whole year’s kill in front of us on a desk!
If we could only make the bodies smaller,
We could fit
A body into a finger-ring, for a keepsake forever.