From Wilfred Owen to his Mother, France 1918
Fastened frosted muds battle with my being but will these tears mean anything if my resolution has come too late?
Will England’s Green shores ever sigh for me; for those slain here?
The smell of the dew is still sweet on my senseless tongue.
Nothing in this septic land could shave the zest from my skin.
When the gasp of my final breath resounds in silence,
I only hope that I sleep and slip away from the impossibility of understanding what has occurred here.
To fade into my torment and leave the things I love.
Can this be my only contentment when
The canvas I envisioned was so white, the page so blank, so vast?
I only ever pleaded for a chance to fill even the tiniest part.
I want for now only to be gone from here, Dear Mother…..
God, these tears burn my cheeks in this cold,
As if I have been moved into the sun, and I feel I am helpless.
If only my life were the sonnet form of this uncertainty,
My existence I could abolish with the half-rhyme of my Knowledge.
For it is law that a sonnet of fifteen lines is no longer a sonnet.
Its very existence has been prolonged beyond definition.
A life form sonnet of thirteen lines has been cut too short,
Gunned down by fate before the indulgence of its own conclusion. France is now a pathetic source of melodramatic monologue.
Trapped without the hidden ear of soliloquy,
Within this surreal Garden of Courtly Love, I am alone.
I can no longer feel the brush of your angel wings as they breeze Through No Mans Land,
Or anywhere on this lonely world-wide shore.
For they have been grabbed to the ground with an unassuming thud by the gravitational pull of bile and death.
And so it comes to this.
To never again hold a thing of beauty in my hand;
To press it gently against my anxious heart.
Is this what I’ve become?
Or to fight on and never speak a word of what has occurred here,
For Dante fell too short in revelation and I am no one to amend.
I have no place here or there and,
In limbo, I will probably die here Mother.
Here with nothing but the burning of my fragile heart to remind me. Earth’s sleep has broken.
Irrevocable, irreplaceable, irresponsible.
But nothing happens.
Barry Miller September 2007: Los Angeles, CA.