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[shanmonster]

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud...
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home -
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now to die and die and die.
Dulce - No - Decorum - No - Pro patria mori.
You walk away.
You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too -
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert -
and light a cigarette.
There''s coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queueing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.
You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly write it backwards,
then it would.

- by Carol Ann Duffy

Comments

Indeed, we are often creatures of tragically wicked superstitions

[montecristo.livejournal.com]

We will honor veterans up one side and down the other, and throw confetti and roses and shout and cheer and sing songs. We'll do almost anything for them but listen to them when they try to tell us truths about war and our participation in it.

Re: Indeed, we are often creatures of tragically wicked superstitions

[shanmonster.livejournal.com]

I didn't cheer at the Armistice Day ceremony today. I cried.