Passchendaele

 

Desperate for sunrise, Harry and I would hunker down,

sharing last drops from some poor bugger's rum ration,

while rats scurried over our boots.

 

When dawn came, we watched the dead swell, mist unravelling around horse and man among scuppered tanks,

their guns trained on clouds.

 

Hard to believe that one day's march away, bird song

from hedgerows startled ripening corn, further along the path

a willow tree presided over reflections.

 

When at rest, we'd take that track to bathe in the river,

then lie on the bank, naked, until dry,

attuned as newborn twins...

 

 

On the fourth of November nineteen-seventeen,

a shell exploded at Harry's feet in the Ypres Salient.

Deafened, and bleeding, I cowered by the fire step,

 

watching limbs and clods of earth rain down around me.

Harry's head rolled by my boots, slowed

and came to a halt.

 

I didn't speak for three days after crawling to the dug-out

with it cradled inside my tunic, wouldn't look at the wagon

waiting to take him and our comrades away.

 

Despite being shrouded in a ground sheet, I wanted to believe,

among that wrangle of butchery and flies,

his blue eyes still sought mine...

 

 

I was taken to a dressing station; spent the rest of the war

in a locked ward back in Old Blighty, wishing I'd flung forward

over the top unbidden and unarmed on the day

 

Harry died at Wipers, when I'd hollered across no man's land,

begging Fritz to lay me on my back, staring up at heaven,

until crows skewered my eyes.

 

But as years passed, I recalled Harry pointing to chevrons of geese

flying over Passchendaele that autumn;

telling me how each bird takes a turn to lead, slicing

 

through the air's resistance with instinctive esprit de corps,

each saving the energy of a fellow

following in its wake.

 

C J Delaney