Armistice Day poetry

The French Woman

She was not young

Nor was her flesh as faultless as the smooth sepia girls of French postcards

A soft, round-arsed woman in a warm room

The wallpaper peeling

At her hips and stomach

Age and three children had lined her

As deeply as the Flanders countryside

He undressed nervously

Fumbling, clumsy from apprehension and Dutch courage

He had never before been naked in front of a woman

He was half afraid she would laugh

He took a quiet pride in her orgasm

As he would in a medal

Or a successful bet.

1915

When he ran through

Air filled with machineguns’ ratatatat

Bodies slumping over folded in half like broken shotguns

Limbless as department store mannequins

But mannequins don’t scream

                                    leave red patches in the mud

                                    call for morphine or their mothers

                                    shit themselves

                                    and go mad

When the shells sent up showers of mud and men

He saw the French woman.

No Mons angel

but her inviting big-arsed nakedness

hung before him in the bullet-blistered sunlight.

When he woke in the night to the sound of a sniper's bullet

colandering a skull

and the night air burned his lungs like chlorine gas

it was from dreams of her that he was roused.

And when he returned to that same town

that same bed

that same round, sagging body

he saw the face of a German he had bayoneted and stamped into the mud.

The French Woman’s Soldier

He looked faintly ridiculous

A young man

                        barely more than a boy

in an ill-fitting uniform. Not so much older

than her own sons.

He approached her body like all virgins,

first tentative, then insatiable,

his flesh a live wire under her hands.

He trembled like a frightened animal.

She put her mouth on him and drew out the fear

                                                                the homesickness

                                                                the thoughts of looking down to find

                                                                      his legs

                                                                           sheared

   off

                                                                           like

                                                                           daffodils

The longing for his mother

and crumpets dripping with butter

a warm bed with time to sleep in.

By the time he came that way again,

she had forgotten his face.

But she treated him with the same kindness she showed to all her soldiers.

Like a priest performing the last rites.

Home

The London streets were stranger to him

than all the bloody yards of France.

He met a girl there

who let him think he was her first.

At his proposal, her eyes filled

with the realisation that she had something else to lose.

Then back to where the guns

were louder than church bells,

and her face faded

like the light in the eyes of a dying man.

He sought out other women, whose paid-for bodies

did not remind him of his comrades’ shattered limbs.

It was easier to replace love with a transaction;

money for flesh. The fighting had taken away

his appetite for complicated things. And he built

a little jar in a corner of his heart,

to keep his love in. So it could be

kept fresh for her,

like something frozen.

Walls

He slogged through the war-churned mud

And wondered

At how many heroic dreams he once had had.

How strange that seemed,

Among these corpses clustered in each ditch

Like moths might gather round a candle flame.

He learned to separate himself;

To build up walls secure as any bunker

Around the part of him that still dreamed of Camden Town.

He kept it walled in

Like a countess.

He became as simple and blunt as a club

And old thoughts of courage did not trouble him

Anymore than they would trouble the rats he caught

With cheese on the end of a bayonet.

Against the flies, the lice,

The flag-charged dying of the place

He held the French woman

And all the facsimiles of her he had sought

In a dozen cheap whorehouses

And so he did not mind

That he woke each morning to the smell of cordite and rotten flesh.

Secure within his walls,

He saved the part of him he would bring home.

And leave the bloody soldier in some foreign field.

Walls (2)

He was silent as a shell-hole

Beneath the guns’ harsh syllables

His rifle barked its orders

Like a major

All at once the walls fell

Swiftly as death

No

Not death

For death is a lazy thing,

And all too often drags its feet.

            He had seen

            Death

            Move slower than a cloud on a breezeless day

            Crawling over the broken living shells of men

            Long since past saving

           

            Death the malingerer

            Arriving hours after

            The crashing of a bullet into some vital place

            The bowels strewn like confetti

            The howitzer’s inarguable command

Something else, then;

Some image more fitting

The dropping of a kestrel

Fast and simple as a stone

Thrown down from the sun-choked sky.

The walls came down.

Out poured the Camden boy

                  the love of home

                  of tea and toast by the fire

                  and other unheroic things

For the first time in three years,

He was seized with the urge to live.

He lay in the hole for three days

Before they found him,

Swollen and black with decay.

He would not live to see his soft, comfortable grandchildren

Wave flags

Wear their poppies like medals

And talk of the glorious dead.