WAR POEM SERIES
With this century proving as deadly as the last, here is a short series of poems on the futility of war.
The Vietnam War Memorial
(Fitzjames Wood)
You are no longer alone
Now with all the names
Brothers who were not brothers
Etched into black granite
Polished parade black
Reflecting trees and sky, hold you
And a memory awakens
At visits from those you loved
A sister survives long gone
Parents whose wounding
Is finished like yours
In sleep and she visits
To lay some flowers and weep
As painful as the first
Kneeling she is undone for a love
So broken in her youth
The name in lines on lines
That mark out the Sun’s journey
For these sons road to sleep
As your marching boots once did
The black coal mirror wall
Replacing them, now stands Instead
For the serving and the pride and
Of the death, for a life once lived
Regimental black boot honour
Dishonoured in this questioned service
To Mars or Ashtoreth or living gods;
A car salesman’s dream
Of holding back imagined threat
Reason’s lost in the madness
And the pained regret leaves us empty, opened
Nothing to get back, now history
In a book or film and you
Like a page of print in negative
White on black, senseless
With no sense of what we lack
A black water paddy field with stains long washed
And sins still buried in the black
Deep soil with those you killed
And your own peer’s disfavour, hatred, flack
At the black stain you painted
Blackening the country’s name
Black, black the colour of the funeral
Black the flags and banners, black
The skin of soldiers recruited, black
Black the stone and black the black
To hide your face in night raids
Black the days you hurt
And black your hurting
Black the dried blood of fatal wounds
Black the message day of your death
Black the mourning, the clergy cassock black
The mood, the sky, the hearts of those
Who came to mourn black
The dress and veil, black
The suit, the tie black
Black umbrellas hiding guilt from God’s great eye
And rain black with acid and soot and black
The colour of the ended life awaiting in the black
Like Lazarus your death, the tears the empty sickness
Of a lack so deep and loss so black a future erased
‘Come back, come back’ the plea of all who cannot cope
And the unimaginable, keeping it together
Against nothing, hopeless but carrying on
And sobbing ‘he must come back, or I must die’
Then death will be not be black but a white out
Relief, an end to all the mad madness that was felt
But the black boot shine, the parade brass shine
Of that one life bound so tight to ours. That shine,
That light left our lives at dying and never returned
He died but though we live we died as well and
So we die slowly bent, marred still working out
Each empty sorrowing day until the weary end.