Somme Interior

He was on the butcher’s block that July in Picardy.

The horizon drummed and quivered in a continual glow.

The German bombardment burst the earth into black trees.

He bumped into the sergeant carrying a piece of meat

On his right arm - the raw-pulp remains of his left arm.

He felt suddenly weightless through space in a rainbow sky.

When he came to, he saw Stan buried to his waist in earth;

From the waist down Stan was missing still facing the enemy,

His helmet tilted at a rakish angle on his wax face.

He crawled back to his lines like a whipped dog.

Days later he saw that the German wire had not been blown.

Some of his battalion hung lifeless in the wire,

the backs of their bloody heads bashed in like broken bowls.

He tried to shoot a surrendering German but missed.

He said nature tried to hide the slaughter in cottage gardens.

He was back to search for corpses in the pungent shitty mud,

He had carried men’s bones and maggots on a shovel

to common graves, from the green water in shell-holes

handled chalk-white slimy bodies that fell to pieces

in his hands as he searched them to find out who they were.

He said he never saw God’s hand on the grim Somme.

But along the parapets he saw purple thistles,

milky-juiced sow-thistle, mustard, the yellow spurs

of toadflax, button-flowered aromatic tansy,

pale purple willow-herb, scarlet poppy, cornflower,

and white ox-eye daisy. On the rusty barbed wire

Bindweed flourished, crimson ramblers, nasturtiums, and nests.

The trenches had hanging gardens of goosefoot, chicory,

nipplewort, grey-leaf fumitory, white-whorled woodruff,

goosegrass, sun-spurge, pimpernel, yellow-eyed forget-me-not.

Some of the soldiers coped by singing nerve-jangled songs.

“Do you want to find your sweetheart? I know where he is,

I know where he is, I know where he is. Do you want

to find your sweetheart? I know where he is. Hanging

on the frontline wire. We saw him, we saw him, hanging

on the frontline wire, hanging on the frontline wire.”

Dad scraped the snowy lather from his skin, hacking

Wiry white hair. The old soldier’s interior was still
an aftermath of war. Doesn’t lyrical Tagore remind us

the first flower that blossomed on this earth invited the unborn song!