This isn't about front lines and deep mud,
it's not about sacrifice and bands of brotherhood.

It's not calling for silence or for national pride,
it's not about cenotaphs and those left behind.

No, this a thank you to one Ernest Page,
Gunner Sergeant, Royal Field Artillery, 182nd Brigade.

Thank you for ducking, thank you for dodging,
thank you for lasting, thank you for living.

Thanks for returning back home to Brockley.
Thanks for asking Gran and building a family.

Thank you for dad and for little Aunt Betty,
for Pam and for Pete and for cousins aplenty.

Thanks for Rose Cottage, for trips round the lake,
thanks for loud laughter and sleepy eyed late

mugs of hot chocolate and medeira cake slabs.
Thanks for my sisters, thanks again for my dad.

Thank you for surviving, and all that implies.
I owe you it all, I owe you this life.

I tear my bones
To try and not
Hear the drones,
Drill in dot.

But soil so ill
Is where I tread.
Shriek when fill
Buddhist debts.

Behind the pillars
In cenotaphs,
Edge killers
Of my calfs

I bread bogged down.
So they would claim
The forest crown,
Clear my name.

Fear my ingrowns!
Alas, they rot,
Drink the drones,
Drill in dot.

Look back when speaking like a cockerel crows,
Chest puffed with pomp to gloat on gloried loss;
Dying men hung no glory on their throes.

At cenotaphs bedecked in bloodied rose
Bouquets, Lord Mayors regale in golden gloss:
Look back when speaking like a cockerel crows.

Prime Ministers parading TV shows
Glory in hanging ratings on the dross:
Dying men hung no glory on their throes.

Young men talk tough of national pride; old woes
Won't heal by stoning rolling migrant moss;
Look back when speaking like a cockerel crows.

Recall dull medals hung on fettered boughs,
Lest we forget the names of those embossed:
Dying men hung no glory on their throes.

Tread light through evergreen and tranquil rows,
Where heroes rest beneath white painted cross;
Look back when speaking like a cockerel crows,
Dying men hung no glory on their throes.

Vast lists of names at cenotaphs
on crosses, in columns of newspapers,
inscribed by those who lived, for those
I never knew so can't remember.

Reduced to uniform remains,
some named 'Soldier of the Great War'.
A greatness in numbers lost,
lives wrecked - measures of excess.

November flags dip, bands march,
standing to mark with silence
violence done to those unknown to them.
Some lament more recent deaths.

The piety of war.

Wide eyed and open in astonishment I watch
Those long and curving red nailed fingers
Close around me in the evening,
Sun setting in the windows of the Hudson
Shenandoah or St. Augustine.
You gather yourself down
And hurl your graceful throat against me.

Wide eyed and open in astonishment you rise
Toward long slow strokes
My hands above you in the morning,
Daylight in the windows of New Jersey
Rhinebeck or the Appalachians.
Your belly rises in my hand
My fingers splay inside your shivering.

There have been many places; fields and orchards
Tombs and cenotaphs,
Anthems and arias,
Airports, winter moons and summer winds.
Gasping at some place just newly touched.

Quite often in the night I find I have reached up and out
And wondered why there is no weight above my empty hands.

Then, open and astonished,
I feel that you have come to rest within them.
Close my curving hands around you,
Remember other moons.

The sky was lost in colors, everything was snowy white, sparkling with whitish clouds that were arranged on top of other pearly ones, which tended to break from the high stupor brought by the Cherubs and Seraphim to receive Vernarth and Alikantus. Arriving at the highest plain, Vernarth saw the Mashiaj who was waiting for him, he was wearing a white garment, and on his neck an ornament that the Hoplite Soldiers of Arbela had given them. When
Vernarth dismounted, and a Hoplomachus could be seen on his Lynothorax, which was the same medallion that warriors carried to face divine death in combat, donated by a Thraex, who had always accompanied him with the Kantabroi with the sulfur mists after dark. rusty battles, and that he wore a manica on his arm that seemed to point with the tip of his finger at chapter
XIX of the Apocalypse of Saint John the Apostle, on both legs an Ocrea labeling the chorus of hexameters that the Sybillas chanted to revive him. And his head rotated three hundred and sixty degrees carrying the Leonatus with another Helmet under his arms with oculars with grid and crest, on his right leg a Xiphos hung like a thelamo that hung from both angles of his legs to approach when carrying his horse thrown by his hands.

His belly heaved with anxiety, in his hands was a folder that Drestnia and Etrestles had written, which had condescended to him from the Koumeterium of Messolonghi, saying:

“All the cities of the world will be called Athens…, because from there you will arrive at Patmos where you are in all places. Everything is old because it soon gets dark, and the funeral address is the first death you had when you were an infant..., all the people who are with your majesty yearn for civility that you imply in the legacy of the deep Christmas in Patmos, with tablecloths, wines, rolls and thick Corinthian wines in their plausible Patmian creation,
leaving them in the corridor that reaches the end, where the alabaster replaces the burning manger..., as a story of two stories and battles, which are exalted narrating the wars after they are their dominated lands suspended in the waters of the Aegean, and tinged with an apparent unrealized pact. The whole the world will be called Patmos, where nothing and no one will defeat you
without first a dirge when the gargoyles of your veins sob, when their capitulation is filled with culture that swirls between the white tablecloths of Kissamos and Kimolos, behold where the Sarissas They will parade through the pantheon like thousands of solitary lances towards the perpetuity of the patrimony that doubles the clouds pregnant with liquid bronze, to be
scattered throughout Athens like marble shawl stoles carried by the Meltemi with the prudence of ennobling cousins shocks of the storms that augur your departure. Nothing of minimalism or arbitrariness that cannot be resolved in loopholes that are hidden among the requirements, in which all the threats have admonished the canopy fallen on your integrity, on the Cherubim who fights with his empty hands like a beautiful angel fallen at the dawn of Miletus, being already a state governed by the Hoplomachus with his dyed sword, where you can see what you can be more than a convention of gladiators, just like that and indeed disposed towards the courage of what the daring produces with the infamy of seeing you pray alone in his black stretch.

In everything you were left alone, favorable only to the disagreement of what you should be or do, then return what you can do, you are already a legionnaire who carries the world on his back struck down with his Corinthian Kantabroi. Why did you stain your tanned hands, why somehow did the Nikephoros bring victories that take time to come and go soon? Thirst for victories they bring vessels and flows incapable of satisfying you in the immensity of their anguish and everything is done just when what fits my thinking fills my belly, and what saturates the belly remains tied to the Rudder of your precocious olive trees, from so much that the drum sounds, it turns it into empires of stones that do not coin the subsidiary complaints of their warfare, if you dare to be hostiles who bring food for dinner and everything that spills the tediousness of piling leftovers where nothing else is huge what an insult to sigh.

Vernarth, the world of Messolonghi and its eternity comes to give you the admission of a Commander!, who negotiates with greatness and simplicity, just as you can understand each other from sixty-four springs that have closed the eyes of Pericles just like yours, where the laws will have to compensate and fill vessels that remain empty for this toast  "Stin iyia sas o Khaire" from
Elpenor to your house and health of a Nikephoros devotional or conquest to win over everything,... but stay drunk alive and be reborn in other taps condescending to mythological ups and downs, where the laws revive the second or third vigils of banquets that lead into the orbit of a Hoplite. Do I see you comfortable in the klismós that carry you to the Empyrium, where the scattered saliva mixed with wine is confused with models to take you to your new home? perhaps of particular or unequal equals or relative merits that will make it exist and will prevent the possibility of doing it again. In the eighth Messolonghi Cemetery a great riot has been made, she prescribes to pay you honors with Markos Botsaris at the head of which all the gold spilled on the table will be made with bows and arrows, shields, and spears to take them to Patmos and Athens by river sounds that sound from the Hékein or the formality of lavishing to do or utter, so that everything is in favor of desolate places that will not be felt by all of Greece when they understand that you carry all the cries of the Warriors who hide behind the moor so as not to see they sob, still feeling the drums of the compass of a victory where wine flows that are written in the stands of Epidaurus, signing the chaste peace with their Medical Wars. It seems good to you that the ghosts speak of democracies, and that they also govern them with the spill of satisfying public ovation that only does it with two or three flags, Oh Cóphade I dress in a foreign outfit that enlivens your lightness from head to toe, I want to see you come back to life on the plains without stopping riding with Alikantus, free from all stratagems and fantastic smells of lavender, and grasses toasted by the summer of the hall, oven of Athens. Do not be afraid, we have distances that
are difficult to overcome, it will be the expulsion of our hearts if we allow ourselves to be caught up in the irrigation of their vulgarities that always complain of open will, do not be afraid, Pericles entrusts your departure just like you at sixty-four, in such a Syntagma double of 32 who appreciates you right and left in our companies, with courage obsequiously in becoming where the wind rises in Abdera.

We can dare to say that we are a group of seven, in the association of 25 Syntagma men who will accompany us split... but not divided! That it is nothing more than death as a double life that is placed in front of you, that shows its opposite side of the Syntagma where victory and defeat offer omens of reviving in both fights, not all of us are saved by our annihilation, nor by their qualities of Picking ourselves up even among those defeated by invisible
conflagrations or just because of the excessive feeling that what ends or begins is not impregnated with beauty, we know that you will come at Solstices and Equinoxes are free of their austere plagues, and reborn from Aspasia or the social life of socialites that Your eyes are drawn from seeing so much beauty ignites in the theater that never ends, and for this, we know that we will measure what fits in your gallbladder, and the wine that we are ashamed to recognize in order to satisfy you, O Brother, receive from an entire nation and from the inhumed of Messolonghi how they will see you happy to come to visit us, whose boastfulness disappropriates panegyric Homer, with plausible lightning from all borders if it is that a Sycomo to makes your initial on its bark, granting a new star to Greece where you can observe that it bears fruit from where you cannot taste it, but you are going to affirm yourselves well from the trunk where you can write values that are similar by virtue of the Kashmar that points to the Aegean Sea.

An immortal never claims a sycamore, rather he claims it with probity that resembles the wealth of a story written by locals who know well that they are spring harvests. No one will be able to hold more praise than Drestnia, and I to receive you in our land clear of enemies and that they sit at our table for the mere fact of avenging challenges that speak of saving and retreating, of counterattacking with perseverance carrying in your hand what breaks the Light and becomes subject to you "The Xiphos Sword". At the end of the voices they are filled with hope and fortune of your sword that could stop time, and bring you made of meat in the herd of Mosul as a weak mischievous, for this reason, it is equivalent to our parents that they will enjoy our vows, such cenotaphs for the weak who have to live protected by vigorous walls that have to engrave in their narrow, empty, and perplexed urns Freedom from other unfortunates who did not enjoy it, who did not cower from dying on earth that does not recognize martyrs who are still destined to live glorious declining. How foolish it seems to you when the mouthful of bodies from the battlefield rise with the same to everyone's heaven, and from evils that become benevolent from so much miracle to live next to them, fearful right there before the city bailiff who does not dare to dare to bury you in their domains, to see you resurrected in the domains or district of the fearful ruler. Now take your halo, take it with your five senses, and make of it courageous thirds where your seal is declaring that no one will erase or forget it "

Our Cenotaphs stand guard at night,
Keeping watch with those that died:
With men of war and courage true--
But with boys afraid and maidens too.

Remember, lad, these names now dry:
They bled and breathed as you and I;
As you and I, their vices had--
But were country slain, my lad.
      Remember that.

Our undercroft had housed our dead
Unseen, in gloomy sepulture.  
But pagan chieftains much prefer
Barrows, where height can show instead.  
And the busier departments need
Those lowest levels for their work.
Glib passers-by avoid that murk,
And absent bosses don’t impede.      
Ensconsed where corpses decomposed,
Those in cubicles will thrive, unvexed,
And never taken from their desks,
They’ll finish the great work imposed.  
Interrers from a raucous age
Buried their kings and queens in mounds.
Since robbers filch, and greed abounds,
The wise entombed their heritage.  
Sarcophaguses, then the norm,  
Are too chilly for a comfy bed.  
The dawn should kiss those lids of lead,
To heat what blankets cannot warm.
Rather than burying in hills,
Top those barrows with their occupants.  
These somber monuments enhance
What would be dowdy domiciles.  
Coffins as cenotaphs and plaques,
Allow the dead to bask in sun,
And feel what veneration’s done.  
Hilltops make the best catafalques.

Kideía Tou Vernarth, The sky was lost in colors; everything was snowy white, shimmering with white clouds that were arranged on top of other pearly ones, which tend to break from above the stupor brought by the Cherubim and Seraphim to receive Vernarth and Alikantus. Arriving at the highest plain, Vernarth spotted the Mashiach who was guarding him, he was wearing a white garment, and on his neck was an ornament that the Hoplite Soldiers of Arbela had given them. When Vernarth dismounted he saw on his Lynothorax a Hoplomachus, which was the same medallion worn by warriors to face the divine death in combat, given by a Thraex, who always accompanied him with the Kantabroi with the sulfur mists after the battles, oxidized wore a manica in the arm that seemed to signal with the tip of the finger the XIX chapter of the Apocalypse of San Juan Apóstol, in both legs an ocrea labeling the chorus of hexameters that chanted the Sybils to revive them. And on his head that turned three hundred and sixty degrees, he carried the Leonatus with another Elbmo under his arms with eyepieces with grid and crest, on his right leg, a Xiphos hung like the telamo that he took from both angles of his legs to approximate to carrying his steed pulled by his hands.

His belly heaved with anxiety, in his hands came to the folder that Drestnia and Etrestles had written that he had condescended to from the Koumeterium of Messolonghi, saying:

"All the cities of the world will be called Athens... because from there you will reach Patmos where you are in all places." Everything is ancient because soon it gets dark, and the funeral speech is the first death that you saw when you were an infant..., all the people who are with your majesty yearn for civil that you implicate in the legacy of the deep Christmas in Patmos, with mantles, wines, rolls and thick Corinthian wines in his credible creation Patmiana leaving them in the corridor that reaches the end, where the alabaster replaces the burning manger..., as a tale of two stories and struggle, which are exalted narrating the wars after which their dominated lands are suspended in the waters of the Aegean, and tinged with the apparent unrealized pact.

The whole world will be called Patmos, where nothing and no one will defeat you without first a dirge when the gargoyles of your veins sob, when their capitulation is filled with culture that swirls between the white tablecloths of Kissamos and Kímolos, this is where the Sarissas They will parade through the pantheon like thousands of solitary spears towards the perpetuity of the heritage that doubles the clouds pregnant with liquid bronze, to be scattered throughout Athens like stoles of marble chaff that the Meltemi carries with the prudence of ennobling the first shocks of the storms that predict your departure. Nothing of minimalism or arbitrariness that cannot be resolved in loopholes that are hidden among the requirements, in which all the threats have been admonished from the fallen canopy on your integrity, on the Cherub that fights with his empty hands like a beautiful fallen angel at the dawn of Miletus, already being a state governed by the Hoplomachus with his dyed sword, where you can see what and you can be more than a convention of gladiators, such as this and in fact disposed towards the courage of what the courage produces with the infamy of seeing you pray alone in its black stretch. In everything you were left alone, favorable only to the disagreement of what you should be or do because you will not be able to return, you are already a legionnaire who carries the world on his back struck down with his Kantabroi Corinth. Why did you sully yourselves with your weathered hands, why somehow the Nikephoros bring victories that are slow to come and soon gone? Thirsty for victories they bring vessels and flows incapable of satisfying you in the immensity of their anguish, and everything is done just when what fits in my thinking fills my belly, and what saturates the belly is tied to the Rudder of your precocious olive trees, from so much that the atabal sounds, it turns it into empires of stones that do not coin the subsidiary complaints of their war, if you dare of hostiles that bring food for dinner and of everything that pours the tediousness of piling up leftovers where nothing is enormous anymore What a grievance to sigh. Vernarth, the world of Messolonghi and its eternity comes to give you the admission of a Commander!, who deals with greatness and simplicity, as you can understand from sixty-four springs that have closed the eyes of Pericles just like yours, where the laws will have to indemnify and fill vessels that remain empty for this toast "Stin iyia sas o Khaire" from Elpenor to your house and health from a Nikephoros prayer book or conquest to win over everything, ... but continue drunk alive and reborn in other taps condescending of mythological swings, where the laws revive the second or third vigils of treats that lead into the orbit of a Hoplite.

I see you comfortable in the klimós that take you to the Empyrium, where the scattered saliva mixed with wine is confused with models of taking you to your new home? Do it again. In the eighth Cemetery of Messolonghi a great revolt has been made, she prescribes to pay you honors with Markos Botsaris at the head of which all the gold spilled on the table will be made with bows and arrows, shields, and spears to take them to Patmos and Athens, for fluvial sounds that sound like the Hékein or formality of lavishing to do or utter, so that everything is in favor of desolate places that will not be felt throughout Greece when they understand that you carry all the laments of the Warriors who hide behind the moor so as not to see them sob, still feeling the drums of the compass of a victory where wine runs that is written in the stands of Epidaurus, signing the chaste peace with its Medical Wars. It seems good to you that the ghosts speak of democracies, and that they also govern them with the spill of the satisfaction of public ovation that only does it with two or three flags, Oh Brother, I dress in foreign attire that enlivens your lightness from head to toe, I want to see you revived on the plains without stopping riding with Alikantus, free from all stratagem and fantastic scents of lavender, and summer-roasted grasses from the hall of the Athens oven. Do not be afraid, we have distances that are difficult to overcome, it will be the expulsion of our hearts if we allow ourselves to be overtaken by the watering of their rudeness that always complains of open will, do not be afraid, Pericles trusts your departure just like you at sixty-four, of such a Syntagma double 32 who appreciates you right and left in our companies, with courage obsequiously in becoming where the wind rises in Abdera.

We can dare to say that we are a group of seven, in the association of 25 men from the Syntagma who will accompany us, divided... but not divided! That it is nothing more than death as a double life that is put in front of you, that shows its opposite face of the Syntagma where victory and defeat offer omens of revival in both battles, not all of us are saved by our annihilation, nor by its quality of picking ourselves up even among the vanquished of invisible conflagrations or just because of the excessive feeling that is not imbued with beauty in what ends or begins, we know that you will come in Solstices and Equinoxes free from its austere plagues, and reborn from Aspasia or social life of gatherings that draw your eyes from seeing so much beauty light up in the theater that never ends, for this we know that we will measure what fits in your bladder, and the wine that we are ashamed to recognize in order to satisfy you, Oh Brother, receive from a whole nation and from the buried of Messolonghi how happy they will see you to come to visit us, whose boasting Homer eulogy disowns, with plausible lightning strikes from all frontiers if a Sycamore makes your initial on its bark, granting a new star to Greece where you will be able to observe that it bears fruit from where you will not be able to taste it, otherwise you will be able to affirm yourselves well from the trunk where you will be able to write values that resemble it by virtue of the Kashmar that points to the Aegean Sea .

An immortal never affirms him about a sycamore, rather he affirms himself with probity that resembles the richness of a story written by locals who know well that they are spring harvests. No one can have more praise than Drestnia, and I to receive you in our land cleared of enemies and sit at our table for the sole fact of avenging challenges that speak of saving and falling back, of counterattacking with perseverance carrying in your hand what breaks the Light and becomes your subject "The Sword Xiphos". In the end, the voices are filled with hope and fortune of your sword that could stop time, and bring you made of meat in the herd of Mosul as a weak naughty, for this equivalent with our parents who enjoyed our votes, such cenotaphs and that The weak have to live protected by strong walls that have to record in their narrow urns, empty and perplexed by Freedom from other unfortunates who will not enjoy it, who will not be afraid to die in the land that does not recognize martyrs who are still destined to live gloriously declining. How foolish it seems to you when the mouthful of bodies from the battlefield rise with it to the sky of all, and of evils that are made benevolent by so many miracles to live next to them, fearful right there before the city bailiff who does not dare to dare to bury you in their domains, to see you resurrected in the domains or district of the fearful ruler. Now wear your halo, take it with your five senses, and make of them courageous thirds where your precinct declares that no one will erase or forget it”

Here the flags are made of stone.

The mossy British god holds vigil
from a humbled candle spire,
and the old kit bags,
one by one,
are unpacked.

Grass untrammeled
Lines unbroken
Liquid living spouting life,
reflecting something
more gray than red.

We are each our own cenotaphs,
having lost you,
lost us.

How do we give it all back to you,
you castoff children of hell?

We only know to give it
to ourselves,
and to carve you like Pharaohs
for a while
for a while.

Lessons come on like glass cuts.
Sudden welling blood
pooling in your palm,
understanding crystallizing
roughly analogous.
And so are we.
Analogues for bigger things.
Our absences filled with
the crippling enormity
of grief.
******* wounds in the world.
And somehow we're expected
not to recover but to be
suddenly good as new.
Glass cuts jagged through skin
like understanding
but you're gone like
forever
and I'm having a hard time
grasping that.
We are analogues for absence
we're just standing in the
place where missing us
and losing us
and forgetting us
is supposed to go.
We are cenotaphs
adorning our own
empty graves.
Roughly analogous.
Like understanding
and the violent, jagged
cuts that the glass made.
The blood pools in my palm
and try as I might
I don't forget you.