Into the Fray.
One foot before another, backwards up
the aisle, the altar pegs the distance between
it and the murky white petticoats that are
sweeping up confetti. I walk.
Who would have known the invitations
were sacrificial? Not I, my very own
marble cenotaph mottled by the draughts
that caught us pulling godlike faces.
Somehow, now, I cannot tell what is ours
and what is mud or where we laid our
trenches. Recollections cannot accept
from the posy of poppies you carried
under the veil of stoned November, we
scattered petals along like Baucan streamers
along the folds of the parachute sheets.
There, we declared world war one. And,
after the thirteenth month of the year, having
decimated our own battlions with rattling
tongues and slept with the desires of enmities,
you and I were left like crooked fence posts
in the sinking marsh of our demise, waiting
for adornment for service to contrary freedoms.
Could you not bear to crucify the corners of
your hanging mouth, just to see the florets
of an amnesty? No - there is no armistice,
only a quiet advance on foreign soils
on which we have not learnt to walk.
