Roy Ashwell
Obituaries in the Times for 14th October
(the anniversary of the battle of Passchendaele)
Rocca, Driver, Robertson. Do you hear me
Read your names from the Times at nine a.m.
This pelting Wednesday? I fish you from the dark.
Before I was born you were engaged to death,
She bedded you at Paschendaele, undid
Your manhood with the red mouth of a moment’s lust.
A gravelong silence answers me, empties the heart,
Freezes the womb to think of you undone
And undone the generations that you left
To march across a century dense with anniversaries.
Your black names massed in the morning columns
Confound the orphaned sense.
The high wet wind cries out; and other histories
Return: the hulks that once were ships, shot ripped
Among the shoals and sea birds calling on the drowned
In the slow spin of the bloody whirlpool we say is Time.
And I remember the wet earth turning over you, undone.
And again the silent intervening years
You might have walked in and all who were not
Your daughters and your sons. Rocca, Driver, Robertson.
Page(s) 3
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