~ Otto Dix Plate 22 ~

Each night I meet myself in nightmares
I am my own enemy fighting in No-man’s land
I am material and real, yet I barely exist
in my imagination.

There is nothing whole and complete
nothing has retained its shape or structure
everything is splintered into surfaces
in my imagination.

There can be only shreds and shards
only textures, hard lines and spaces
where white light can dance free
in my imagination.

Each night I crawl through ruined houses
along dark passages that close me in
dropping to bottomless depths of myself
in my imagination

There are only axons and dendrites in my mind
electric sparking, all atoms in a crystal night
a grasping hand, a gaping eye disconnected
in my imagination.

Each night I try to find myself in nightmares
I am my own enemy fighting in No-man’s land
I am dark energy and matter, yet I barely exist
in my imagination.


© M.L.Emmett

He’s gone away forever,
Mother says he’ll be back soon,
But it’s going to be just like dad.
He’s been away since June.

It’s hard to hold back tears
When mother speaks his name
I falter upon telling her
That he’ll never be back again

The night before he went
He sat down by my bed
“You take good care of mother”
That’s the last thing that he said.

He went to war out of hatred
Which blurred his sense of love
For those he held so sacred.
And now he sits above.

The soil is boiling.
Noxious fumes rise from fissures.


Ice cubes and air-fresheners
Are thrown down from the mansion windows
And we are expected to go to war.


To war, where we will get to be
    Harvested by machine guns,
    Throttled by creeping yellow-green,
    And drowned in ice
        While our blackened feet fall to pieces.


Blind old Nikolai
Can't see the flames
Burning behind thousand-yard-staring eyes
Sunken into one hundred million hollow faces.
    Hollow faces etched into the night
    By the glow of mortar blasts
    And factory fires


He revels in ineptitude
While our agonizing joy
Is found in the next teasing grey sunrise
As we seek to one day return
To the torn and tear-dampened recollections in our pockets.


While a colonel weeps into a photograph,
The wife of his brother weeps into a telegram
    As her cousin is getting his vocal cords clipped out in the streets of Petrograd
        And his father is being eviscerated upon factory

Yes, Nikolai;
The soil is boiling
And I will live, I must live
If only to see the day
That it crumbles beneath you.

As darkness falls the shelling stopped and the Earth grew ever colder.
It’s taking far too long to die for one badly wounded soldier.
Abandoned by his comrades for the safety of their trench,
He’s dying out in no man’s land amidst the gore and stench,
too late for prayer, too late for Love Too late even for repentance.
He hears the cries for “Mother” from those under the same sentence.
With labored breath he, too, gives voice to the dark forbidding sky.
The last word from his dying lips is the simple question: “Why?”

Poulton Library and
Adele & I are here to
share with whoever
arrives some thoughts
concerning War and
Literature.  Linda sets
us up with chairs and
table, and first here is
delightful surprise: Pat
who I taught thirty years
ago - there will be no
need for me to dig a
trench and put on a
jacket bullet-proof
with tin hat on my
head - Philip Larkin
Alun Lewis, Sassoon
and Wilfred Owen
give staunch support
to Jon Stallworthy's
World War One tome
Anthem for Doomed
Youth: Twelve Poets
but doomed not us
this century later.


(c) C J Heyworth June 2014

Beginning in WWI,
The men were at war,
Fighting, killing,
Causing their own Post Traumatic Stress.
And we stayed. Our country, our families needed us.
We replaced them. The men. We replaced them
In their jobs. We did as they did.
We kept the country and the troops
On their feet.
Created weapons.
Kept businesses running,
Did the banking.
The women took charge for once.
The war and the economic trouble got us
On our feet and we did the same
For our nation and our men.
Some did not like that we were working as they had,
Walking in their shoes, but we sure did.

she brings him tea,
a piece of cheese late morn  
for he has been toiling since dawn  
his plane shaving the wood reverently
the old oak speaking, though not complaining,
in a language the man does not understand  
a coughing code for loss, forbearance, acceptance,
redemption, he hopes, for the boys keep coming…
first from Ypres, the Verdun,
now the Marne    

before, he heaved hewn planks
for the hopeful homes, built their pantries
to be filled with the bread, the kind milk  
now the sawn boards are for those who once
watched his labors, but no longer hear the simple
sounds of sanding, sawing
or anything at all  

most of the lads do not come home,
their souls and bodies left to rot on the blood sullied grass  
or buried shallow, naked in the French soil, but all get a fine coffin  
thanks to the carpenter’s wife, whose babe was the first to fall,
who demands for them all, a holy horizontal home to be built  
and, empty or not, placed gently in Anglican ground

Here lies Georg.
A hero of war—
The iron youth.