No lyric ever stopped a tank – Seamus HeaneyFrom the moistened surface of my tongue attend this crafted gift to instil faith.No battle tank ever blocked a poem, no armour-piercing round ever shattered a stanza word by word. Architecture, statuary, paintings, snared in the gaze of a scope’s reticle, all fragment to pounded dust. But phonemes, syllables, glottal stops shard through brains smoother than shrapnel. Poems, shielded by their lack of atomic stuff, resist a Merkava’s