Prussian nights, Mediterranean afternoons:
the golden age of war moved about,
west to east, north to south.
The poets followed and walked among the grey
battalions of men who couldn’t explain
the whys and the wherefores
of the war when war poets ran out of rhymes.
What they saw they saw in monochrome –
the snows of Serbia, a morning fog
that kept on thinning on the Somme.
What they wrote they wrote in smoke,
the names of places strange to them,
poems that were last testaments.
What they heard they heard
through the antiphon of artillery on both sides
and in the holes they hunkered in
saw dead pals still giving the thumbs-up sign.
From The Sundays of Eternity, Dedalus Press, 2020
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