Requiem for Ben

Memorial Part 1:
[D-Day Landings, Normandy Coast, 1944]

Purple the homicidal sea;
purple with sunrise
and the cello-moan
of slow-departing night,
purple with doom and destiny,
an antique majesty,
an antique mourning,
in a suave anticipation
of the meteoric falling
of the flesh and bones to come.
Purple with horror…

The array is spread,
steel to steel horizon;
poised, a robotic athlete
at his blocks.

The silence groans
like dew across the cobweb
of the slow departing night –
a silence cleaved
by weird metallic creaks
and the slop and wash of water
on the bellies of the landing-craft.

Below decks –
the glow of a cigarette;
the flip and snap
of playing-cards;
a last letter written, read;
the glint of vomit;
the slick paraphernalia of terror.

The coastline rears
from out the night,
a pale rider on a broken nag.
Hesitant, it limps
across the dying stars,
pauses, grazing in the mist –
an eternal breath
before the hunters
meet the hunted.

Safe in distant bunkers
pale statesmen
smoke fastidiously,
balancing crystal in clean hands,
their obsession
drawn to war-games
played on long tables
and the tight buttocks
of secretaries
bending there,
ruling the waves with batons…
something of England, Home
and Beauty;
something of whips
and the sweet pensiveness of pain.

Purple the homicidal sea.
Purple the homicidal coastline.
A low whistle:
the faint apologetic cough of guns;
a last uncertainty.
I, below decks,
flex an awkward belt and holster,
nod my helmet home,
inspect my boys
with eager, anxious eye.

Did I hear the angry shell?
You will not know.
Did I feel at all –
pain? fear? rage?
forgiveness?
passion? pride?
You will not know.
Did I see my brave boys quake
or did I squeeze my tight eyes shut?
You will not know.
Did I hear them scream
or clap my hands about my ears
in a last abrupt denial?
You will not know.
Did I scream
or meet eternity
with the lethargy that heals
(with relief
I did not have to prove myself,
and kill)?
You will not know.

Below decks and
where no longer there are decks
and where the purple water flows
and where the bits of us
that are not quite oblivion
bleed in purple plenty,
the hungry fishes peck.
If there is silence,
there is no one now to hear.
Where there is silence,
even hungry fishes die.

Above,
purple the homicidal sea!
The asylum doors are down
and the lunatics are out.
Purple the sunrise!
Crimson the shout and
mirthlessness of men!
Mauve and strobe-violet
the flash of guns!
Artillery sobs and bares its teeth,
rampaging with
haphazard maniacal yelps.
Salvos reap young bones
and blood drips on the wind –
red snow and snowdrift
in a red-June-morning-falling.
Red seaweed skulks
about the water’s edge,
puts out raw tentacles,
and sighs the young men home.
Beside the purple sea,
the red men die.

Safe in their distant palaces
pale statesmen sing
of fame and famous victories
and take their pay in draughts
of shredded generations
and drink the warm red blood.
Soft, they find themselves
beached –
come the new dawn –
in the tight buttocks
of secretaries
bent across
their monstrous charts,
splayed on paper oceans.
Lunatics! They know nothing
of the purple homicidal sea –
and less of me. Later,
they will cause
a grey bureaucracy
to regret in black-edged poetry
me, missing in action,
having the honour to inform
et cetera –
regret bones my family
will try not to imagine
but will pick like careful scavengers
unbidden to the feast,
looking for hope and finding –
nothing!

Purple the homicidal sea
plucked me.
Strange the stone
that footnotes me.
There are no bones
nor anything at all of me
but unforgiving memory.
Where bones went,
my family gave me –
silence!
I waited at windows.
I listened at doors.
I hovered in the starlight
in the grey between-worlds.
They never spoke of me.
They never forgave me
for being taken by a shell
in the purple sunrise,
in the purple sea.
There is a tombstone
in a field in Leeds:
I am not there.
There is a belt and holster
in a drawer:
I am not there.
There is a name on no one’s lips:
I am not there.

My last leave,
I saw them one by one
and wove each to the weft of me
and one by one waved
each a last goodbye…
A last kiss… a last tear…
a last diminished smile…
Now, dismembered on the beach,
something of me reaches out:
they know my name
but cannot speak it out –
for rage? for grief? for pain?
Can’t they forgive me for having died,
and call me Ben again?
Can’t they call out my name?

Cursed, the homicidal sea
that stole my syllables from me
and washed me
wordless on the shore –
my brave boys
in glittering clusters all about me –
the tide a jackal at our meat…

I met my brother
in another world today.
I shook him by the hand
and we embraced.
“I know you,” he said.
“Too long,” I said,
“Oh! too long dead!”

Memorial Part 2:
“We, conquered by William,
have set his Homeland free”
_{[Inscription: the Memorial Wall,
the British Military Cemetery,
Bayeux, Normandy]}

Lost, and is found:
a few sparse syllables etched
top left, Panel Nineteen,
on a wall of arches and of words –
an inventory of the untraced unburiable –
less than one mile
from the Bayeux Tapestry
on the path from Domesday to doomsday;
a theatre of headstones
that would make granite weep:
memory…
the unforgotten and the unforgettable.

In the corner of some foreign epitaph
he keeps his watch:
you should come see; come see,
tears in your pocket
and a handkerchief the size of France.