On a Villager Killed in the Crimea War
Your obit is squeezed onto the bottom
of your parents’ grave half-hidden
in the rough at the churchyard edge:
‘John, their son,
killed in the Crimea War,
Aged 25 years’.
Men in your day rarely stirred from home
to the next village, perhaps to the next town.
To ‘join the army’ really was
‘to see the world’,
a way to escape, one of the few,
the claustrophic kiss of village life.
It was on the cards of course that you’d be killed,
but fancy having to travel all that way,
to the fabled Abroad, just to die!
Was it a bullet or a Russian shell?
Improbable the glory of Balaclava
for a foot-soldier like you:
more likely mundane, unheroic fever.
I only hope your brief escape was worth it,
for in the end they got you back again.
From now till Armageddon or Judgement Day
(whichever may come first),
in a scruffy part of the village graveyard,
guarded by keck and nettle,
your bones are here to stay.
Page(s) 32
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