Roy Cockcroft
The Batteries at Longues-sur-Mer
In the car-park
The number-plates of different nations
All reflect the same light
Coming from the same bright star.
On the cliff top
Tourists look out across the same calm sea,
Watching the same gulls gliding
Over the beach on their stiff wings.
Once they piped fuel here.
Long arteries on the seabed
From England all the way to France
Bled petrol
For the dull green traffic of liberation.
Pulsing to free the lanes
That now commemorate their sacrifice
With street signs and sudden well-kept crosses.
Youngsters clamber over the batteries,
Yelling through the slits.
One small boy sits on a bronze plaque
Which remembers the 'intensity of battle'
And the 'enormity' of German and Allied losses.
In the holes made by gunfire
On the first day,
When the defenders were left
With only two real choices,
The rain sticks to its task,
Organising pools,
Left in sole charge of rust,
Eroding the memory of concrete and steel.
Coming from the flat, grey skull
Of one blockhouse -
German voices.
Page(s) 42-43
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