In the Trench
STAND TOO!!
Morning orders, onto the step, guts churning, rifle ready,
steady,
pupils mimicking the foraging rats.
STAND TOO!!
Stand close to the slimed, clay wall.
Close to the boy, my other, my brother,
who came here only yesterday, heart whole, cheerful.
Sharing a cake his mother baked, still fragrant in its tin.
CROUCH, LOOK OUT! But he, long knowing the sun as friend,
lifted his head, stopped, dropped, still smiling,
eyes no longer light with boys delight, face obscured by bloodied curtain.
I never knew his name, he was just another soldier.
Blessed night, no light, moonshine, star-shine,
Oh! Infinite darkness, cover me.
Suns probing search, discard me, reject me.
Expunge by brain of birdsong, childsong love song, laughter.
Make me as one with the earth,
as rat, as beetle, as disease ridden fly.
Plunge me into nothingness,
Show me how to die.
Did you fly?
There above the moil and muck, the stench of rotting tissue.
DID YOU FLY?
In that last dawn, that opal culmination of your days,
that SECOND when the bullet struck, smashed synapse.
Screwed nerve endings in hypoxic ecstasy. Did you fly?
In that shard of time, that splinter of infinity,
when your brain bled red, and you drowned in blood?
Was there sense of the countenance divine, his rivers, mountains,
his wondrous works.
In that second as your heart burst.
Did you fly?
And did you know him, praise him?
Did you offer our life to the god head?
Did ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ echo in your soul.
Did you believe in the cause, the sacrifice.
Did you become one with the majesty.
Did you fly?
© Eileen Earnshaw
