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Nothing to show for it at first
But dreams and shivering, a few mistakes.
Shapes lounged around his mind chatting of murder,
Telling interminable jokes,
Watching like tourists for Vesuvius to burst.
He started listening. Too engrossed to think,
He let his body move in jerks,
Talked just to prove himself alive, grew thin,
Lost five jobs in eleven weeks,
Then started drinking, blamed it on the drink.
He’d seen a woman, belly tattered, run
Her last yards. He had seen a fat
Friend roll in flames, as if his blood were paraffin,
And herded enemies waiting to be shot
Stand looking straight into the sun.
They couldn’t let him rot in the heat
In the corner of England like a garden chair.
A handyman will take a weathered chair,
Smooth it, lay on a glowing layer
Of paint and tie a cushion to the seat.
They did all anyone could do —
Tried to grate off the colour of his trouble,
Brighten him up a bit. His rare
Visitors found him still uncomfortable.
The old crimson paint showed through.
Each night he heard from the back of his head,
As he was learning to sleep again,
Funny or terrible voices tell
Or ask him how their deaths began.
These are the broadcasts of the dead.
One voice became a plaintive bore.
It could only remember the grain and shine
Of a wooden floor, the forest smell
Of its fine surface. The voice rasped on
For hours about that pretty floor.
“If I could make that floor again,”
The voice insisted, over and over,
“The floor on which I died,” it said,
“Then I could stand on it for ever
Letting the scent of polish lap my brain.”
He became Boswell to the dead.
In cruel script their deaths are written.
Generously they are fed
In that compound for the forgotten.
His crowded, welcoming head.
The doctors had seen grimmer cases.
They found his eyes were one-way mirrors,
So they could easily look in
While he could only see his terrors,
Reflections of those shuttered faces.
Stepping as far back as I dare,
(For the man may stagger and be broken
Like a bombed factory or hospital),
I see his uniform is woven
Of blood, bone, flesh and hair.
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Populated by the simple dead,
This soldier, in his happy dreams,
Is killed before he kills at all.
Bad tenant that he is, I give him room;
He is the weeper in my head.
Since London’s next bomb will tear
Her body in its final rape,
New York and Moscow’s ashes look the same
And Europe go down like a battleship,
Why should one soldier make me care?
Ignore him or grant him a moment’s sadness.
He walks the burning tarmac road
To the asylum built with bricks of flame.
Abandon him and you must make your own
House of incinerating madness.
The horizon is only paces away.
We walk an alley through a dark,
Criminal city. None can pass.
We would have to make love, fight or speak
If we met someone travelling the other way.
A tree finds its proportions without aid.
Dogs are not tutored to be fond.
Penny-size frogs traverse the grass
To the civilization of a pond.
Grass withers yearly, is re-made.
Trees become crosses because man is born.
Dogs may be taught to shrink from any hand.
Dead frogs instruct the scientist;
Spread clouds of poison in the pond —
You kill their floating globes of spawn.
In London, where the trees are lean,
The banners of the grass are raised.
Grass feeds the butcher and the beast,
But we could conjure down a blaze
Would scour the world of the colour green.
For look, though the human soul is tough.
Our state scratches itself in bed
And a thousand are pierced by its fingernails.
It combs its hair, a thousand good and bad
Fall away like discs of dandruff.
For a moment it closes its careful fist
And, keening for the world of streets,
More sons of God whisper in jails
Where the unloved the unloved meet.
The days’ close round them like a dirty mist.
When death covers England with a sheet
Of red and silver fire, who’ll mourn the state,
Though some will live and some bear children
And some of the children born in hate
May be both lovely and complete?
Try to distract this soldier’s mind
From his distraction. Under the powdered buildings
He lies alive, still shouting,
With his brothers and sisters and perhaps his children,
While we bury all the dead people we can find.
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