Lines after the death of Johnny Owen
A year later I think of how you died,
Forgetting where and why and most of all
The name of your executioner,
That hard, simple man they cheered from the ring,
Head bowed, sweat-brightened, face cowled like a monk.
What's clearest is the video's imagery
Of a pale cadaver ready for the morgue,
Your brain reduced to one thin brilliant line
On the scanner in the graph of extinction.
A life switched off like a television set.
No boxing man, I queued for newspapers,
Let the ink stain my hands as the headlines
Hailed a martyrdom, and in blurred profile
You posed again for combat and brief celebrity,
A cartoon face shadowed by naked fists.
Our comfort is the deaths you have escaped:
Erskine's devastated speech, slurred words
Thrown like a drunk's punches, the Louis wheelchair
Parked at every championship ringside,
All broken gods and secretly despised.
It's youth preserves you and the huge
Simplicity of your art, the fact that
In the midst of an obscene ritual
You showed humility. And died without protest.
Another wasted life that Merthyr must take back,
And does with long and sorrowful parade,
Those awkward men and dark-mascaraed girls
Disturbed by grief or that complicity
Of everyone who has watched the bodies fall,
Looked at themselves and yet not felt afraid.
(This poem should have formed the sixth and concluding part of Robert Minhinnick's long poem published in Poetry Wales Vol. 17 No.3. We apologise for its omission.)
Page(s) 29-30
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