The breach
It is the night, the silent shroud that calls
upon these images of soldiers,
locked in trenches,
waiting for the order to arrive,
tomorrow or tomorrow:
to rise and leave the safety
of the dull and horrid clay,
the company of the newly dead,
and join the screaming and the silent;
those who were hung on the barbed wire
or lie half-drowned, half-frozen
in the gas-filled craters.
When history seeps through
but not explains itself in dreams,
through the breach of night,
when Ypres and the fields of France
become the words that now unleash the dark,
and all our fears and strange desires:
to be there, out among the dying and the dead;
to taste this fear and die one night -
alone and screaming - die another,
in the company of men, who die
in their hundreds, within seconds.
Die in a sea of screaming red and then
to rise again in dreams like these -
where death is but a fever,
a memory half-sought;
a testimony of sorts,
to be forgotten in the morning,
when the birds set off the dawn
and the street wakes up to the sound of cars,
to the walking order of the day -
when the soldiers lie forgotten,
like the graves and statues
that must try to keep the dark alive,
as a murmur, as the waves -
and as I rise, and now walk slowly to the kitchen
and that first quick cup of tea,
to the shower then, to wash my hair,
and feed the cat;
to do the things to do with living,
the trenches die again;
the dead lie silent.
The past no longer beckons.
There are thoughts of you,
your body, as my body now recalls it,
next to mine.
The way your life now holds most of my dreams
(but for those soldiers dying,
lost, forgotten -
merest shades,
vague recollections)
all of my stories and my daily, fleeting life.
My heart for now restored to this,
to me, to you;
my body moving through the early day.
All is, again, this moment,
the silence of these new beginnings:
the love and touch and whisper
of our wakening clay.