Centenary of Wilfred Owen’s Death

Tags

autorotation, Beaumont Hamel, Bois des Fourcaux, Bois l'Eveque, calvaire, Cambrai, Craiglockhart, del Gesu, Delville Wood, Dufay, dunnock, Hamel, Hebuterne, Last Tree, lynchet, Mametz, mandrake, Maricourt, Napier University, Ors, Queen's Hall, remblais, Sassoon, Somme, Steve Burnett, sycamore, The Branch, Wilfred Owen, World War 1 poetry

A re-blog:

A friend told me about an amazing radio programme about Steve Burnett,

in Edinburgh, making a Wilfred Owen violin from a fallen branch from a

sycamore tree from Craiglockhart Hospital, now Napier University,where

Sassoon and Owen met and discussed their poetry, before Owen

returned to the trenches and met his untimely death.

I listened to the programme and then felt compelled to write the

following piece:

 

The Sycamore Sings

Shall life renew these bodies?  Of a truth

All death will he annul…

(amended words from his poetry on Wilfred Owen’s gravestone)

 

Where a mother muted her offspring’s ire,

deleting his line’s interrogative;

where Dufay scored his music at Cambrai;

St Quentin’s corpse loomed from the Somme marshland,

to hallow the grandest basilica;

where guillotines did their grisly work,

fog lifted from shattered Bois l’Eveque-

new dawn drawing back night’s curtain of war.

 

On a towpath, a twenty five year old,

tried not to fret how he would cross the bridge.

Mesmerised by the autorotation

of seeds, he foresaw his own slow spiral,

where magpies croaked in blasted canopies.

Dark, stark poplars had been lopped long before;

the copses razed; the rides and lynchets scarred.

Mametz, Maricourt and Bois des Fourcaux:

sweet chestnut, lime, beech, hazel, oak, hornbeam-

mad mandrakes uprooted; bi-furcated trunks.

Sad remblais of Hebuterne (No Man’s Land)

absorbed shrill batteries near sunken lanes.

Calvaires bowed before continuous suffering.

In Beaumont Hamel, a single tree remains,

petrified. In Delville Wood, The Last Tree

stands like a gibbet. Sycamores survive.

They grow where other trees give up the ghost.

One such, at Craiglockhart, he could recall.

Again he heard the dunnock’s douce refrain,

singing for dear life, from lush foliage,

before its notes were silenced, once for all.

Fragments of father’s sermon rose to mind-

about The Branch, hope, regeneration.

Now, while still green, a supple slice is bent

into a tongue which will tell of all loss,

tears oozing like resin from a wounded bark:

man and nature in divine harmony.

In Queen’s Hall, it will sob and it will sing

of the pity of war – the air fleshily weeping.

And, one being dead, yet will be speaking

through a universal language of peace,

from a pattern once conceived by Gesu.

The Sycamore Sings

Tags

autorotation, Beaumont Hamel, Bois des Fourcaux, Bois l'Eveque, calvaire, Cambrai, Craiglockhart, del Gesu, Delville Wood, Dufay, dunnock, Hebuterne, lynchet, Mametz, mandrakes, Maricourt, Napier University, Queen's Hall, remblais, Sassoon, Somme, St Quentin, Steve Burnett, sycamore, The Branch, The Last Tree, Wilfred Owen

Brassica told me about an amazing radio programme about Steve Burnett,

in Edinburgh, making a Wilfred Owen violin from a fallen branch from a

sycamore tree from Craiglockhart Hospital, now Napier University,where

Sassoon and Owen met and discussed their poetry, before Owen

returned to the trenches and met his untimely death.

I listened to the programme and then felt compelled to write the

following piece:

 

The Sycamore Sings

Shall life renew these bodies?  Of a truth

All death will he annul…

(amended words from his poetry on Wilfred Owen’s gravestone)

 

Where a mother muted her offspring’s ire,

deleting his line’s interrogative;

where Dufay scored his music at Cambrai;

St Quentin’s corpse loomed from the Somme marshland,

to hallow the grandest basilica;

where guillotines did their grisly work,

fog lifted from shattered Bois l’Eveque-

new dawn drawing back night’s curtain of war.

 

On a towpath, a twenty five year old,

tried not to fret how he would cross the bridge.

Mesmerised by the autorotation

of seeds, he foresaw his own slow spiral,

where magpies croaked in blasted canopies.

 

Dark, stark poplars had been lopped long before;

the copses razed; the rides and lynchets scarred.

Mametz, Maricourt and Bois des Fourcaux:

sweet chestnut, lime, beech, hazel, oak, hornbeam-

mad mandrakes uprooted; bi-furcated trunks.

Sad remblais of Hebuterne (No Man’s Land)

absorbed shrill batteries near sunken lanes.

Calvaires bowed before continuous suffering.

 

In Beaumont Hamel, a single tree remains,

petrified.  In Delville Wood, The Last Tree

stands like a gibbet.  Sycamores survive.

They grow where other trees give up the ghost.

 

One such, at Craiglockhart, he could recall.

Again he heard the dunnock’s douce refrain,

singing for dear life, from lush foliage,

before its notes were silenced, once for all.

Fragments of father’s sermon rose to mind-

about The Branch, hope, regeneration.

 

Now, while still green, a supple slice is bent

into a tongue which will tell of all loss,

tears oozing like resin from a wounded bark:

man and nature in divine harmony.

In Queen’s Hall, it will sob and it will sing

of the pity of war- the air fleshily weeping.

And, one being dead, yet will be speaking

through a universal language of peace,

from a pattern once conceived by Gesu.

You can still listen to the BBC programme on I-Player for another

3 weeks.

 

 

School Picnic at The Lawn, Whitchurch (80th Anniversary of The Battle of the Somme)

Tags

Heilly, Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls, Remembrance Sunday, River Test, Somme, The Lawn, Whitchurch

(A re-blog of a poem written some years ago, but which

is of current interest with Remembrance Sunday

approaching.)

Brigadier wheat gilds the road from Somborne,

ready for reaping, caressed by the wind

and somnolent poppies, marginalised,

incline their bloody heads in remembrance,

while cornflowers, blue as a young man’s eyes,

or forget-me-nots, blink from future swathes.

In Whitchurch Lord Denning reminisces

about his brother, Jack, whose final note

was pencilled home before the telegram’s

bombardment.  This was a lifetime ago.

That name was stamped in tin, tacked to a cross

somewhere in Heilly.  Master of the Rolls,

you lived for your country; he died for it.

These rolling downs, now ripe with swaying crops,

owe their existence to a million

casualties: the blossom of Europe’s manhood;

mown down for twelve muddy kilometres

and a nonagenarian who claims

an Englishman’s home is his castle.

Boys with Supersoakers, artillery

fuelled by Test water, are trigger happy,

running to and fro like mad, bunkered rats.

Their aged host watches the annual tug-of-war

between sides formed from the same public school.

They strain to win, heels well dug in, entrenched,

trying to etch their team on Honour’s roll.

Something about healthy competition,

obligation, a new generation,

is the substance of his annual speech.

When all have gone, he thinks of five brothers

for whom the tug of war was not a game

and of the one who was pipped to the post

before he’d had a chance to fire his round.

His walking stick prods a discarded vest.

A shrill skylark, startled in the trees,

explodes a petal shower overhead

MH17

Tags

Abandon hope!, aspic, belfry, bog cotton, Calvaries, church bells, Edwardian tennis, forced rhubarb, magnesium ribbon, MH17, Pandemonium, sandbags, shepherd's delight, sky burial, Somme, sunflower fields

Dusk in the balmy garden and church bells

ring changes from a mellow brick belfry,

clappers half-muffled by tumbling mill-race foam,

pealing the death toll we have heard tonight:

curious calm before the lightning strikes.

 

 

A century ago, lazy summer

solarised racquet-wielding Edwardians

in tolled moments, before magnesium fizzed,

immortalising ghosts on negatives,

preserving transient smiles, like forced rhubarb,

cloched; stiff attitudes in aspic.

 

 

Within a month, or so, haunted faces

would grin among stacked sandbags, before shells

shattered poppy fields and the bloom of youth.

This sky is roseate- shepherd’s delight.

Heat radiates from my garden wall and

the old house sighs.  Swifts swoop, prelude to bats.

 

 

I go indoors to watch the latest news.

It shows some ravaged sunflower fields- a toy,

torn pages which a child has coloured in;

pixellated shapes amid fuselage.

Scavengers in balaclavas rifle

through a Pandemonium of small fires,

like unshocked devils, not so sick of sin.

 

Markers, like clouds of bog cotton, white flags,

or stars in a galaxy of hatred,

parody a kind of sky burial.

 

‘Abandon hope‘, I think, until I note

telegraph poles, like crosses standing firm

amid Man’s carnage, still Somme Calvaries.

 

A century, and yet we have not learned.