#wilfred
I cannot settle in Blighty.
Wounded or not I have changed.
My feelings are with my comrades,
platonic, a complex of simplicities.
We talk only together for no others understand
beyond the old lies and the gas attack of poetry.
My being is incomplete.
I lack the wounds
to disregard life
beyond my skin.
Dec 19, 2015
Dec 19, 2015 at 2:00 PM UTC
Who may not talk must fight,
engage the diplomacy of guns,
though having supped the devils' ***
we look on our works and despair.
Ideas have become principles
and our givens must be taken.
Vile words replace understanding
or mitigate our unfound trust.
Perhaps one should contemplate
or denounce our loss of grace
displacing belicose thoughts.
Dec 9, 2015
Dec 9, 2015 at 2:13 PM UTC
At Wilfred Owen’s Grave
by Michael R. Burch
A week before the Armistice, you died.
They did not keep your heart like Livingstone’s,
then plant your bones near Shakespeare’s. So you lie
between two privates, sacrificed like Christ
to politics, your poetry unknown
except for that brief flurry’s: thirteen months
with Gaukroger beside you in the trench,
dismembered, as you babbled, as the stench
of gangrene filled your nostrils, till you clenched
your broken heart together and the fist
began to pulse with life, so close to death.
Or was it at Craiglockhart, in the care
of “ergotherapists” that you sensed life
is only in the work, and made despair
a thing that Yeats despised, but also breath,
a mouthful’s merest air, inspired less
than wrested from you, and which we confess
we only vaguely breathe: the troubled air
that even Sassoon failed to share, because
a man in pieces is not healed by gauze,
and breath’s transparent, unless we believe
the words are true despite their lack of weight
and float to us like chlorine—scalding eyes,
and lungs, and hearts. Your words revealed the fate
of boys who retched up life here, gagged on lies.
Published by The Chariton Review, The Neovictorian/Cochlea, Rogue Scholars, Romantics Quarterly, Mindful of Poetry, Famous Poets and Poems, Poetry Life & Times, Other Voices International
Keywords/Tags: Wilfred, Owen, war, poem, trench, warfare, chlorine, gas, gangrene, armistice, ergotherapists, Craiglockhart, Sassoon, Yeats, honor, lies, gag, gagged, gagging, death, grave, funeral, elegy, eulogy, tribute, World War I
Mar 19, 2020
Mar 19, 2020 at 3:42 AM UTC