I Swipe All Of My Best Lines
So, that bad poetry I was talking about yonks ago? It's bad. I keep poking at it to see if it gets any better, but I dunno. If anyone wants to take a gander at it and let me know how you think I could tighten it up and make it more of a coherent, structured piece of work, that would be awesome. The ending isn't right, but I had to end it somehow for the time being. And I'm sure you're all going to take one look at it and go, 'TOO LONG'. It's not exactly Beowulf, but it's not precisely short either. (It's nowhere near as good as Beowulf either, but hell, a girl has to start somewhere.)
I saw your face in October,
Sandwiched amongst others,
Held together in a crumbling packet
With a rotted rubber band.
I picked you out of the bunch,
Held you up to the light.
Private Harry Sullivan,
1st Canadian Division,
Late of Greensville, Ontario.
With your rumpled Irish face,
Your badly cut hair and surprised eyes,
You saw the gates of hell open before you,
And they looked like a trench in France.
Did you come back to your father’s apple orchard
Tangled in the branches of that dark wood?
Was the snap of a twig, the scuff of a pebble,
An unexpected footstep on a gravel path,
Each and every time your undoing?
You lay down in green pastures and woke to flaming skies in a world unknown,
And each day you rose and staggered forth into the regions of the dead.
On the third day of June, there was a cavalry horse, speared by branches, snorting blood-flecked foam onto the obscene
forest floor.
Like the farmboy that you were, you caught at its snapping reins,
Got your arm up around its long muzzle,
Brought its head down next to yours,
And, in good practice for what would come next,
Put one well-placed bullet in its forehead.
When everything else was forgotten,
Did you read and re-read your mother’s letters,
Fingering the envelopes in your breast pocket before every sortie?
(The cow has calved.
Judy is sending you socks son but they are purple.
We trust you are doing well Over There.)
You clung to scraps of paper
(We miss you)
Until the Flanders rain
(We love you)
washed the ink onto your hands.
(Come home.)
In the mud of Ypres, did you dream of a girl?
Silk stockings and a face like a magazine,
Mademoiselle from Armentieres, with sweet-smelling flesh?
Or maybe, before the war, she was just the butcher’s daughter,
With mild grey eyes and freckled arms,
An antebellum vision in an abattoir apron.
Once, on furlough, you paid a country girl with those same grey eyes five francs,
And she boiled water, and snapped out clean towels with the sound of a rifle,
And, with her best friend, hid giggling behind the kitchen door,
As you sank into the best deep-dish sit-down bath you ever had in all your life.
It’s a long way to Tipperary,
But life is longer still,
And death is longest of all, so pack up your troubles.
In the last days of the Somme, did you dream at all?
Private Harry Sullivan,
From Greensville, Ontario,
With your awry hair and your big hands.
There is an ocean between you and me
And six feet of French dirt.
And there I stood, with your picture cupped in the palm of my hand,
Looking at it in the first days of autumn.
Every year, when the light is spare and clean and golden,
And the sky has never been quite this blue before,
When the leaves and the sparrows are underfoot,
And the apple orchards are full of children,
I will slip your picture into my wallet,
And, sitting on the subway on Armistice Day
Amongst the living,
Will think of you.
.