Ah, palm trees! The symbol of Caribbean getaways, Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles and secret homes tucked away behind their spiky fronds. Ancient art shows kings and queens and emperors being fanned with expansive palms. They rustle in the slightest breeze, need little water to grow, the fronds are of a type of green that... Wait a minute, green? Then why is this poem titled The Yellow Palm?

Are palms ever yellow? Of course, but it's generally a sign of the plant's ill health. Perhaps only a lower frond may turn this colour in its senescence, the same way other leaves do. But if the entire palm turns yellow, it's a definite signal that it's in danger.

With this title, Robert Minhinnick lets us know that his palm tree represents the very opposite of lighthearted getaways. There's a brooding disease corrupting its life. And, by extension, the lives carrying on beneath it. For all that its rhythm makes it sound jovial, it's actually

  • a testament to life enduring in a conflict zone
  • a series of images, each preceded by a refrain
  • evidence of the pointlessness of war
  • an expression of hope for the future.
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Who is Robert Minhinnick?

Robert was born in the Welsh market town of Neath in 1952. Gifted with a keen mind, he embarked on a full academic journey, including university studies. First at Aberystwyth University, and then, on the Cardiff campus of the University of Wales. His lifelong keenness for the written word led him to early success. His first tome, Native Ground, was published in 1979.

It seems Mr Minhinnick has a bit of a restless nature. Not that he's a vagabond or unfocused. Only he soon realised how desperately the Earth needed people to champion its causes. Thus, he helped found Friends of Earth Cymru in 1994. He served in various capacities, for a time. He's also had a hand in establishing Sustainable Wales.

But there's that restlessness. He has travelled extensively, all over the world. To Albania, Brazil, Iraq... He clearly doesn't pick easy, touristy destinations. These voyages help frame his writing. He often embraces political themes, usually as an observer. Unlike the poet Carol Ann Duffy, he seldom attacks, defends or gives a hint of his personal views.

His vast touring and his passion for writing have melded into award-winning narratives. He's won the Forward Prize for three of his poems and was shortlisted for a fourth. His work has earned other awards bestowed by the Society of Authors. Most impressively, he's won the Wales Book of the Year award three times. That's once per decade since the award was established, in 1992.

A market street in Kuwait City with pedestrians milling around between the rows of buildings
Kuwait was a rich, vibrant country before being invaded. Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

A Bit of Background

Now that we know how thoroughly Robert Minhinnick embraces his role as a global citizen-observer, we can find out what inspired him to write this moving work. In August 1990, on Saddam Hussein's orders, Iraqi troops spilt over the Kuwaiti border. Those forces set up shop and, for seven months, terrorised innocent Kuwaitis. To this day, no one is clear about why this invasion happened.

Some speculate that Iraq was having trouble paying back the loan they got from Kuwait to finance the Iraq-Iran war. Others insist that Kuwait had streamlined their petroleum production too effectively. They created too large a supply, which cause oil prices to drop in all the oil-producing countries. And they refused to cut their production so Iraqi forces meant to do it for them.

A third possibility: Saddam Hussein claimed that Kuwait was historically Iraqi. It only became an independent country through British meddling. Thus the Iraqis had a duty to reclaim their historical lands. That's a rather familiar-sounding argument, isn't it? Russia claimed the same about Ukraine.

Whatever the reasons were, Iraqi troops refused to withdraw, as instructed. That compelled a United Nations coalition of forces to intervene. Iraqi troops were forcefully expelled but they didn't go quietly. They set ablaze every oil well they found on their way out; somewhere between six and seven hundred, all told.

The international community condemned Iraq, both for the invasion and the subsequent brutality. Iraqi leadership installed a puppet government and called the country The Republic of Kuwait. They looted the treasury and engaged in egregious human rights violations. This criminal endeavour deepened the region's political instability, a condition that persists to this day. However, Saddam Hussein was permitted to continue his murderous regime.

In 2003, US troops, assisted by British forces, invaded Iraq. They intended to find and destroy all weapons of mass destruction and denuclearise the country. This invasion only made citizens' lives more precarious. They'd suffered greatly during the Hussein regime; now, they would be caught in the crossfire between insurgents and foreign forces. And they had hardly a bayonet between them to defend themselves with.

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The Yellow Palm: Overview

You couldn't tell when you start reading this narrative, that it recounts atrocities, not festivities. The first line of each stanza serves as a refrain, rather like a balladeer would start each verse of a song he writes. Because that refrain makes its way across six stanzas, we get the impression that Palestine Street must be very long. Or maybe the writer is standing still and all these things parade in front of him.

The poem is a colourful but sensitive account of various sights in Baghdad. Unlike with the poem The Farmer's Bride, we're not being told a story. Each vision makes us a witness to these events. It describes the results of violence, implying a dreadful explosion without directly showing the reader.

The Yellow Palm

As I made my way down Palestine Street
I watched a funeral pass -
all the women waving lilac stems
around a coffin made of glass
and the face of the man who lay within
who had breathed a poison gas.

As I made my way down Palestine Street
I heard the call to prayer
and I stopped at the door of the golden mosque
to watch the faithful there
but there was blood on the walls and the muezzin’s eyes
were wild with his despair.

As I made my way down Palestine Street
I met two blind beggars
And into their hands I pressed my hands
with a hundred black dinars;
and their salutes were those of the Imperial Guard
in the Mother of all Wars.

As I made my way down Palestine Street
I smelled the wide Tigris,
the river smell that lifts the air
in a city such as this;
but down on my head fell the barbarian sun
that knows no armistice.

As I made my way down Palestine Street
I saw a Cruise missile,
a slow and silver caravan
on its slow and silver mile,
and a beggar child turned up his face
and blessed it with a smile.

As I made my way down Palestine Street
under the yellow palms
I saw their branches hung with yellow dates
all sweeter than salaams,
and when that same child reached up to touch,
the fruit fell in his arms.

A shot upward of a green palm frond with the sun shining through.
Palm trees are only yellow if they're severely malnourished or extremely thirsty. Photo by Syd Sujuaan on Unsplash

Analysis: The Yellow Palm

Although the poet says he travels down the street, we see a parade of characters come past us. A funeral, ex-soldiers begging for money, a missile and a beggar child.  The device must explode, but we only know because of the verb ‘fell’ as the dates collapse into the outstretched arms of the beggar child. The poet disguises the violence with the picturesque scene – but not entirely.

Form and Structure

The poem is written in six stanzas of six lines, in ballad metre.  The rhyme pattern is an extended version of the basic four-line ballad, which was originally a folk-poem form. But Minhinnick is following in the footsteps of writers like Wordsworth and Auden. He chooses to use the strongly rhythmic pattern to illustrate serious subjects.

By doing so in six-line stanzas, he has a little more room to develop each image. He can still stay true to form and change the focus regularly. There is a very strong rhythm to the form. It keeps four stressed beats in the first of each two lines and three in the second. There is a fraction of a pause that readers or listeners may further associate with ballad form.

This means that, when read aloud, the poem might go faster or slower. But it won’t substantially change the emphasis a reader places on the words.  Sometimes, we find conflicts with the natural stresses of words. When the rhythmic scheme (the metre) wants us to stress them one way and their normal pronunciation prefers another, such as ‘dinars’ and ‘beggars’.  However, this uncertainty challenges the reader to be thoughtful. To be considerate of the meaning of the words when a perfectly rhyming verse would not.

Rhyme is very important in ballad verse; it’s worth looking at the patterns the author creates. In order, the rhyming words of each stanza are:

  • ‘pass, glass, gas’
  • ‘prayer, there, despair’
  • ‘beggars, dinars, wars’
  • ‘Tigris, this, armistice’
  • ‘missile, mile, smile’
  • ‘palms, salaams, arms’

The strongest tricolon -a group of three rhyming words, is arguably the last. That makes the poem end with a strangely warm and comforting group of words. Palm call forth exotic locales, salaams signal reverence and arms are appendages you embrace with. These visuals are quite at odds with the violence unleashed by the projectile's explosion.

‘Tigris', 'this' and 'armistice’ form a diverse group of words, including one of the very few proper nouns in the poem. Coupling it with 'armistice' makes it sound like the author is demanding an armistice where the Tigris flows. And rounding the tricolon out with a determiner seems like the author insists it come to pass.

Determiner aside, this tricolon also contrasts timelessness with something temporary. Tigris is an ancient body; armistice is a relatively new concept. The river is nature, the armistice is man-made. As Seamus Heaney makes clear in Storm on the Island, political matters contrast quite well with phenomena of the natural world.

Language

As we’ve already examined the words Minhinnick chooses, we can now focus on the strongest of his word pictures.  The dates, ‘sweeter than salaams’, mix the fruit's literal sweetness with the metaphorical sweetness of the welcome this visitor has found in Baghdad.  The smile of the beggar child, with which he ‘blesses’ the passing cruise missile, shows how innocent he is. How undeserving of suffering.

The ‘cruise missile, / a slow and silver caravan / on its slow and silver mile’ has a really sinister air when described like this.  ‘Slow’ is impossible for a flying weapon, even though the poet repeats it.  Perhaps he is thinking about the way time seems to slow when we see something awful like a bomb about to hit.

Giving the missile possession of the mile by the little word ‘its’ gives the weapon dominance over the scene. We have to ask: why silver when flat grey would be closer to reality? The device might be that colour, but the author probably took poetic license to enhance its hue. Note that, throughout the verses, he makes the scenes as vibrant as possible. This may simply be another example of such.

It might be tempting to say that this is just a case of an author exercising poetic license. But that evocative image, of a shiny object intent on doom, sparks a hundred other ideas in our heads. To call the projectile a ‘silver caravan’ is a dreadful joke. Missiles don’t bring prosperity, they cause pain and grief.  It might have been expensive and valuable, but nobody wants it to arrive at the market on Palestine Street.

Themes in The Yellow Palm

War is anything but glorious. True, it may change societies and no one would argue that profiteers gain handsomely from it. But for ordinary people, for the craters on the skin of our Earth... For the death and destruction and the pain and the loss, war is nothing but an exercise in futility.

Robert Minhinnick perfectly illustrates war's futility by showing us a funeral procession in the very first stanza. Toward the end, he presents us with a serene, smiling beggar child. Who would that child grow up to be, were it not for the war? Who would anybody on Palestine Street be if there were no weeping or blood?

Human suffering is this work's next major theme. Although he depicts life carrying on as best it can, markers of suffering are everywhere. In the women's wailing, in the muezzin's eyes and the blood-spattered temple... Perhaps even in the child welcoming the incoming Cruise missile - the instrument that will end his desperate existence.

These verses are infused with the dignity of life. Missiles may rain down but the dead will be honoured. Blood may spatter temple walls but the faithful will commune and honour their god. The blind beggars who fought in the Mother of all Wars - Saddam Hussein's obscene label for the first Gulf War. They enjoy the human touch as dinars are pressed into their hands. The money itself permits them a bit of dignity.

A rubble-strewn street with an intact building in the background in Mosul, Iraq.
The glimpses of war we're treated to are mercifully tame compare to the atrocities committed. Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

The Yellow Palm: Summary

Today's news broadcasts censor the true horror of war. We might see a crater or a building destroyed but we never see bloodied corpses. Disturbing images are kept from us - on one hand, mercifully and, on the other, insidiously. If people only knew how truly atrocious scenes of war actually are...

Robert Minhinnick doesn't try to explain why soldiers return from battle shell-shocked and profoundly disturbed. He paints a scene for us and challenges us to insert ourselves in it. We might be one of those wailing women or a devout going to prayer. He lends us his eyes, relating all he sees in that instant, in that conflict zone. How deeply we immerse ourselves is up to us.

He narrates his visions in the first person, balladeer-style. The ostensibly jovial introduction to each stanza provides continuity. He shows us no changing landscapes; only different features. It suggests that the street in question must be very long to accommodate all of those scenes.

The poem is structured in six stanzas of six lines each, the first of which is the refrain. They are written in alternating iambic tetrameters (first, third and fifth lines) and iambic trimeters (second, fourth and sixth lines). The rhyming scheme is ABABAB CDCDCD. It contains no enjambments; each stanza depicts an individual scene.

This writer uses tricky language to achieve his rhymes. Some of the tricolons do not necessarily rhyme; the reader must change their pronunciation to achieve that effect. He uses colour to convey his personal distaste for the situation. For instance, the dinars may have been described as black because they bore Saddam Hussein's likeness.

The title is a metaphor for the rot and disease permeating the scene. Palms are not naturally yellow, they only become that way if they are starved of nutrients or otherwise uncared for. Thus, while scenes of daily life unfold across these verses, there's no denying that a pervasive illness imbues it all.

Robert Minhinnick reveals the beauty and dignity of human life far better than Romantic-era poets' ethos permitted them to. Though narrated in the first person, he intentionally leaves personal commentary out of his recounting. In that sense, he serves as a man-on-the-street reporter, albeit to a particularly gruesome spectacle.

At the least, the reader is invited in as a spectator. At best, they should go beyond the pictures this writer paints with his words and even beyond the generalisation that war is brutal. Atrocities take place everywhere and Minhinnick is widely travelled. However, he chose Baghdad specifically because that region's horrors are often minimised.

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Emma

I am passionate about traveling and currently live and work in Paris. I like to spend my time reading, gardening, running, learning languages, and exploring new places.