Craters
swallow
the Earth.
Beneath it,
mines throb and swell,
dragging
muddied wings – nothing
grows in the noisy soil, the dead,
Lazarus, blood-soaked, drenched
to all horizons. Johnny
lost a leg – an English leg? Now
he flitters in the medical
tent, safety written
red; rain
bounces
off off
and into our boots –
Like bombs. Like bullets.
A silver bite, blood
fanged: wave a web
above the bunker, coils, the snarling noose.
Tom will die
of fever, clean, far-flung
from war’s glory; his
roaring eyes burn white, don’t
sting, swollen, red
from gas.
Bob tells stories, staving off The Pain.
We consider these, our little days: Gorgon
grey.
Then a rolling blue, a
sky churned in childish frenzy, a laugh
breaking cries to steely-grey echoes
back- back- back-
(boom) (boom)
to green distances pinned behind
industry, red brick houses of corn-beef complexions –
now human error, it
blinks, ague.
Hopeless, hopeless –
the disproved, the (un)shelved creep
out, cobbled
in tip-toed ranks to gawp and drag and weigh
at my morning’s edges.
A new recruit stares, a dog
kicked lame into corner and around
war’s waterlogged bunkers, jostling
in their fractured joints to clear skies, a million
little Englands, no heavier than birdsong.