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Wendy French

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Distance

And the guns in the smashed wood thumping and grinding.
The letters written there, and received,
Books, cakes, cigarettes in a parish of famine
And leaks in rainy times with general all-damning.
                                                             (Ivor Gurney, Laventie)

Sunday, nearly dusk, early December,
walking a distance not my choosing.
I’m thinking of the letter you say is on the way,
probably still travelling over the Atlantic,
through clouds threatening snow,
to arrive while you are dreaming.

We’ve met, yet not through Gurney’s traumas,
his wanderings, wanderlust for oaks and stiles.
We know we’re not mad but sane, not sane but mad.
Here in Dulwich Woods Washington’s gridlines
have little meaning. You’re marked on my map
by your research and learning.

And though through the woods I hear the bells
of St. Stephen’s, the guns are firing in my head,
a speeding hearse masks the scream of the fox
snaring at nightfall. Men would be sharpening
their pencils and writing in trenches.
I’m reading your thesis and learning.

A small boy runs past me and falls.
His tears land on a ground hardened by frost,
but Ivor is composing in the absence of birdsong,
and it’s then I catch gunfire in the wind.
The church service will be starting, people singing,
somewhere a man is crying for help.

 

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