Sunday, November 11, 2007

Remembrance Day Poets






Keith Douglas
(Jan 4, 1920 - June 9, 1944) The most famous English poet of WWII, he was killed in Normandy.



To Restore a Dead Child

by Keith Douglas
Sometimes while I sleep
I hear the single cry and the tire screek
that never end.
My blond and foolish brown-eyed brother
lugging his fretful love
shambles after me
as the cunning Mack truck
lurching out of nowhere
cuts him down.

He's a long dead almost-three.
I'm a long lived five
just turned sixty-one
still running in a dead heat
with the rolling cab that swooped him up
heading for the vanished hospital.


It's then on waking
I feel the snot of infant faces
leak into my mouth.



1925




Vergissmeinnicht (Forget-me-not)
Elegy for an 88 Gunner

by Keith Douglas
Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.


The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.


Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht
in a copybook gothic script.


We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that's hard and good when he's decayed.


But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.


For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.






~


Sidney Arthur Kilworth Keyes (May 27, 1922 - 19 April 1943) joined the army in 1942 and fought in Tunis as a lieutenant in the West Kent Regiment. He was killed in action one month before his 21st birthday.



War Poet

by Sidney Keyes

I am the man who looked for peace and found

My own eyes barbed,
I am the man who groped for words and found
An arrow in my hand.
I am the builder whose firm walls surround
A slipping land.
When I grow sick or mad
Mock me not nor chain me:
When I reach for the wind
Cast me not down:
Though my face is a burnt book
And a wasted town.
Leave

- 1942


--Cat

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