‘To find a dinner gown which will be becoming, correct, and yet not depressing to its beholders is always a problem for the woman in mourning, but it may be readily solved by this frock of black point d’esprit and black silk net, over black taffeta. A bag braided in dull black beads with a […]
The Pity
The exhumation squad’s verses
Exhumation squads dug to unearth them In bits that got dropped in cloth bags While one man stood by with his notebook Recording all readable tags. It was not the most popular service Retracing those old trench charts Then shaking off well-rotted khaki From almost unknowable parts. One father pitched up to bribe us To […]
The Big Push
after Sir Herbert James Gunn ‘The Eve of the Battle of the Somme’ Would you believe it, there’s a bloke out there singing ‘When You Come to the End of a Perfect Day’. His audience, a sixty-pounder crew, stand round bleeding from the ears. The Boche are all but finished, apparently – I heard they’re […]
from ‘Tucked in where they fell’
‘Tucked in’ isn’t quite how we’d put it. We weren’t plumped up neatly in bed. If you ‘fell’ as one piece you were lucky, Not dismembered before you were dead. We wore dog-tags of vulcanised fibre But those need their ‘dog’ to stay whole Or to keep enough bone to be tied on Not be […]
from Letter for the Unknown Soldiers
I see. This is the shape remembrance takes. To get it, the scale had to be brought home. Imagine them moving in one long continuous column, four abreast … as the column’s head reaches the Cenotaph the last four men would be at Durham. In India, that column would stretch from Lahore to Delhi. Whichever […]
from War Poem
1. There is a war going on in my country. In all the years I have lived in this body, there has been no peace. My mother still has hope in her heart, she keeps a suitcase packed just in case. This whole life we have been waiting for our flight to be called. In […]
from Rising
In Mosul, Homs and eyeless Gaza kids swarm the streets of the dismembered caliphate spouting freedom and riches, styling with AKs and PSG 10, theatres of dreaming and war: the kops and graveyards of FIFA’s planet are stiff with creaming boys. This time it’s oil, not markets. This time it’s oil, not borders. This time […]