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Mario Petrucci

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G.I.

You’re still on duty soldier     at your post
of rock     hands longer  than life     many-jointed

at the stock of a barrel of rust    Keep watch
with that one good eye   frigid enough

to move     you could tick a fingerbone     still
pick off the German     in your sights

that procession     of hatchbacks glinting up
the switchback     to the abbey     How they crawl
while your line of sight     is the velocity

of thought     Ah     spring shoots between
your bleached ribs – an upturned skiff     Next

yellow ginestra     vibrant on old blood
then Autumn     dumps a leaf in the brown po

of your helmet     But Winter – remember
won’t you?     one Bud using his helmet     iced

with February     for a pisspot     another
cradling his pebbles     of faeces     for warmth
Your only cover     the Dead     so you crawled

up Mount Belvedere     a slow hula of hips
on scree     traction of fisted forearms     but one

decided to stay     You     sat upright as you caught it
in the eye     one thought of Kansas     the fourth

of July     how those great thrusts of sparks
at a distance     and very late     become

a cigarette-stub in the night     a cough
of embers across the lines     laboured
shallow     sad

 

Mario Petrucci was poet-in-residence at the Imperial War Museum and is currently Royal Literary Fund Associate Fellow at Oxford Brookes University. His debut collection, Shrapnel and Sheets, is a Poetry Book Society recommendation.

Page(s) 32-33

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