Apr 9
THE CUPBOARD OF THE YESTERDAYS
The War marches
across the map
on little coloured pins
blood red for us &
bright green for them.
The colours faltering
in the candlelight
after the lights
had gone out.
One can still see holes
from the previous War
that pinned men down
so that they
would never move again
they the never returning.
THE CUPBOARD OF THE YESTERDAYS
falling from mother's sleepy hand.
"War is a cruelly destructive thing..."
it both begins & ends.
Men wriggle under
coloured pins & die.
Saki smiles sardonically
from THE TOYS OF PEACE.
I move a pin to where
father maybe is.
I am glad
mother sleeps at last.
In the somewhere of now
a bullet splinters bone
my father falls
the agony of the moment
revealed in the telegram
that will come
a month later.
Father has become
History.
Mother will read her Saki
and cry and try
not to let me see
her cry.
I, a small boy
can't cry.
Death appears
like a fairy story.
What War
awaits me?
*
The Cupboard of the Yesterdays," a short story written by Saki aka H. H. Munro a few years before he was killed on the Western Front in 1916,.
"War is a cruelly destructive thing," said the Wanderer, dropping his newspaper to the floor and staring reflectively into space.
But the old atmosphere will have changed, the glamour will have gone; the dust of formality and bureaucratic neatness will slowly settle down over the time-honoured landmarks; the Sanjak of Novi Bazar, the Muersteg Agreement, the Komitadje bands, the Vilayet of Adrianople, all those familiar outlandish names and things and places, that we have known so long as part and parcel of the Balkan Question, will have passed away into the cupboard of yesterdays, as completely as the Hansa League and the wars of the Guises.
At the start of the First World War Munro was 43 and officially over-age to enlist, but he refused a commission and joined the 2nd King Edward's Horse as an ordinary trooper. He later transferred to the 22nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, in which he rose to the rank of lance sergeant.
More than once he returned to the battlefield when officially still too sick or injured. In November 1916 he was sheltering in a shell crater near Beaumont-Hamel, France, during the Battle of the Ancre, when he was killed by a German ******. According to several sources, his last words were "Put that ****** cigarette out!"
Munro has no known grave.
The War marches
across the map
on little coloured pins
blood red for us &
bright green for them.
The colours faltering
in the candlelight
after the lights
had gone out.
One can still see holes
from the previous War
that pinned men down
so that they
would never move again
they the never returning.
THE CUPBOARD OF THE YESTERDAYS
falling from mother's sleepy hand.
"War is a cruelly destructive thing..."
it both begins & ends.
Men wriggle under
coloured pins & die.
Saki smiles sardonically
from THE TOYS OF PEACE.
I move a pin to where
father maybe is.
I am glad
mother sleeps at last.
In the somewhere of now
a bullet splinters bone
my father falls
the agony of the moment
revealed in the telegram
that will come
a month later.
Father has become
History.
Mother will read her Saki
and cry and try
not to let me see
her cry.
I, a small boy
can't cry.
Death appears
like a fairy story.
What War
awaits me?
*
The Cupboard of the Yesterdays," a short story written by Saki aka H. H. Munro a few years before he was killed on the Western Front in 1916,.
"War is a cruelly destructive thing," said the Wanderer, dropping his newspaper to the floor and staring reflectively into space.
But the old atmosphere will have changed, the glamour will have gone; the dust of formality and bureaucratic neatness will slowly settle down over the time-honoured landmarks; the Sanjak of Novi Bazar, the Muersteg Agreement, the Komitadje bands, the Vilayet of Adrianople, all those familiar outlandish names and things and places, that we have known so long as part and parcel of the Balkan Question, will have passed away into the cupboard of yesterdays, as completely as the Hansa League and the wars of the Guises.
At the start of the First World War Munro was 43 and officially over-age to enlist, but he refused a commission and joined the 2nd King Edward's Horse as an ordinary trooper. He later transferred to the 22nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, in which he rose to the rank of lance sergeant.
More than once he returned to the battlefield when officially still too sick or injured. In November 1916 he was sheltering in a shell crater near Beaumont-Hamel, France, during the Battle of the Ancre, when he was killed by a German ******. According to several sources, his last words were "Put that ****** cigarette out!"
Munro has no known grave.
(Guildford)
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