Remember the dead
i
The list of permanent remembrance for those dead:
Joan Roberts
Grant Byleveld
Those not listed:
Patricia Higgins
Greg Rutherford's Mother
Two grandfathers
One grandmother
Uncles
Aunts
Everyone else who ever died
There.
Done at last.
Now I can sleep before midnight -
not have to drag myself through to exhaustion.
ii
He remembers God.
Remembers standing in the church every week
thinking on the hollow intonations they all made
as though God meant nothing.
The Jews had not done it, Pontius Pilate hadn't either.
Ritual was the murderer – he was sure of it.
Ritual took everyone eventually.
On St Helena, a thousand miles off the coast of
West Africa, they excavate a mass grave of slaves,
at least, he thinks, they had some company
within a Soviet border they
lined up Jews and opened fire.
Where was it again? It is important that he remembers
some people lay dying for hours
others survived by keeping still as soldiers went about
putting bayonets through to ensure
who would want to live in such a world anyway?
iii
They go away for Easter every year the same farm.
The cold comes in, the fire is lit.
The ashes get swept into iron pans and taken to the tree line.
They are heavy for what the wind can blow away.
iv
He is on a tram on Remembrance day. Up a hill
they commemorate. He hates the word monument.
He hates that they are always on hills.
Now we wage war without ever leaving home.
Sit at a screen, push a button and
the missile drops.
(When she gets home you still look her in the
eye.)
Innocents die.
It makes ugly poetry.
Metaphors can’t make the journey.
We have used them up. It's colder
than you can feel,
more wrenching than you cry, shout,
purge through your blood filled being.
I read Sebald writing of a narrator relating a story of a character telling an account that he'd read of Gladstone Novelli's grappling with the after-effects of his torture during his internment as written by Claude Simon.
I want you to understand exactly how it was –
pull out every detail,
make you know.
There is something in the folding –
maybe it's a military service I want.
Corner taken to exact corner and then
folded again to exact corner and then
folded again.
