Nothing in Hugh Seidman's untitled poem tells us outright what the film is, who is in the room, or whose face is pressed to the pillow. The poem works by leaving gaps, and the gaps are where its meaning gathers. Only the last three lines name anything concrete: a hut, artillery, napalm. By then the reader has understood that the subject is how images of war, once seen, refuse to leave a person alone.
The first image does a lot of work. "The film / under an eyelid" holds two meanings at once. A film is a movie, but it is also a thin coating, and the word belongs naturally beside the eye. The eyelid is the body's way of switching the world off, yet here it becomes a screen on which something keeps playing. Closing your eyes offers no escape. The poem then seems to move from a public scene, "the roomful / of people," to a private one that begins with "& afterwards." The ampersand gives the line a quick, jotted-down feel, as if the speaker were taking notes in a hurry. After the gathering comes "the face / pressed / to a pillow," which suggests someone trying to block out light, or feeling, or both. The line is broken into three short pieces, so the face seems to be pushed down word by word.
"An irritant" sits alone on its line, and the word is chosen with care. It continues the eye imagery, since an irritant is what makes an eye sting and water, but it also understates. Whatever this is, the poem calls it a nuisance, something small, and that mildness sits uneasily with what follows. The smoke "passes / in the mind," and the verb "passes" is oddly calm. Smoke drifts and thins, and yet the poem plants it inside the head, where it cannot drift away. The poem seems to be testing how an unbearable thing can be experienced as a low, persistent sting.
The ending is built differently. Three phrases beginning with "in" are each set apart by white space: "in a hut," then "on a field of artillery," then "in a fire of napalm." They have no main verb and no full stop, so the poem never finishes its sentence. Each phrase works like a slide dropped into a projector, and the pace is slow enough that the reader has to look at each one. The scale also changes. A hut is small, human and domestic, the nearest thing in the poem to the pillow and the room where someone lies. Artillery and napalm are industrial and impersonal. Between the first image and the last, a shelter turns into a target, and the sound pattern follows it: "field" and "fire" echo each other, as if one were turning into the other. Judging by the imagery, the poem points to modern warfare without naming a particular war, which lets it stand for any distant violence that reaches us through a screen.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. Its lines are extremely short, often one to three stresses, and the rhythm comes from the breaks between them. Pauses do the work that punctuation usually does. The few sound effects are quiet ones: the soft p of "pressed" and "pillow," and the hissing s of "smoke passes," which sounds like the thing it describes.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about a particular kind of discomfort. It does not shout about war or tell the reader what to feel. It shows a viewer who is safe, in a room or in bed, and whose safety is exactly what makes the images hard to bear. The mind has taken in something it cannot put down, and the unfinished final lines leave the reader in the same position, with the picture still running and no sentence to close it. The poem is short, but its form carries its subject: a thing seen and left unresolved.