MY WAR

the bomb fell on the graveyard
the dead laughed
they were used to being dead

the moss had eaten their names
the dead could not remember
who they were

a batch of kids
clutching gas masks
afraid of the sky

blackberries and air raid sirens
his name on cardboard around his neck
they were living the war

the war
had invaded their lives
bombs had become normal

the gas mask
left out in the storm
filling up with rain

he didn't like the gas masks
they turned people
into insects

"A carrot on a stick!"
instead of an ice cream
"but then I'd never had ice cream!"

"Carrots can't
stand them to this day!"
clouds reflected in his eyes

Daddy was up in the air
fighting in the sky
I never cried when he died

he went up in the air
and stayed there
"Next door to Heaven!" Mum says

strange creatures in a field
cows I think they're called
I'm afraid they'll eat me




He'd never seen a cow 'til then and to him it was just a rather large animal lumbering towards him with hunger in its eyes and its mouth gnashing as it went. To a seven year old boy it was just a seven year old boy eater. He ran screaming madly from poor old Daisy who wouldn't have hurt a fly only swished at it with her tail. Like you he came to love cows in his time.


Tom telling me that once upon a time a long time ago there was a War and a little boy somehow survived it and came through it. He said the War took his childhood and left a changeling in its place. "You had your childhood...I had History!" We tend to forget what the person in front of us has actually lived through. To me it was a story in a history book...to him...his life. So I wanted to write it for him in his words scrawled across my mind.
He'd never seen a cow 'til then and to him it was just a rather large animal lumbering towards him with hunger in its eyes and its mouth gnashing as it went. To a seven year old boy it was just a seven year old boy eater. He ran screaming madly from poor old Daisy who wouldn't have hurt a fly only swished at it with her tail. Like you he came to love cows in his time.
My poem riffed on W. B. Yeats' great Civil War poem( The Stare's Nest at my Window ). All three poems try to hold on to the beauty of the world as the world falls apart. Sometimes all we have to fight it with is the innocence of a child.
One poem turns to the other as the centre can not hold...and a terrible beauty is born.

AND THE KEY IS TURNED ON OUR OWN UNCERTAINTY.
He still called a starling
a stare.
I watched his voice
as the bird in his words
flitted from Yeats to Shakespeare to
Pliny the Elder before
landing in the Mabinogion.
Outside
in the real world
a starling was
being its
noisy and gregarious
self.
The walls between literature
and the real world
are loosening.
He has fed my heart
on fantasies.
Memory crumbles
back into the earth
I carry from your grave
on my new shoes.
The clock I see
still stands
at twenty past four
as it has done for years.
Your voice comes
and builds
in the empty house
of my heart.
*
The Stare's Nest by My Window
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned.
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war:
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

W.B. Yeats