Remembrance Day poets – posting from 2007

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 DouglasSometimes 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 DouglasThree 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