The Dog of the Light Brigade

We have to remember: when Raglan and others
decided that hour had come, and did as they felt,
and ordered their mess-mates and countrymen -
yes, the noble six hundred, most of whom never

had even so much as imagined what shooting
and shelling were like, away from the Shires,
much less endured it – when they had advanced them
up to the mouth of the innocent valley known later

thanks to the Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson,
thanks be to him, as the Valley of Death, the din
of their bugling and clanking and neighing and stamping
and shouting stretched back to the stables a distance

behind them, and woke there the pampered fox terrier
kept by the men as a mascot, who thinking that this
was the point of his madcap existence, revealed at last,
sprang from his bed among tit-bits of horse-dung,

squeezed through a crack in the ill-hammered planks
of a door, then again through the arms of a boy,
and sped off to join them. This was the dog
who was never surprised in the barracks. Most nights,

indulged with a table-side seat in the mess, he gazed
on the faces of men whose acceptable practice was drink-
ing until one collapsed, whose moustachioed mouths
repeated the same snorting farmyard of noises over and over,

viz: Frenchmen and Russians and women and Prussians
and Turks and women, until they were cancelled,
one by the other, or smudged in the baccy-fug,
wine-fumes and high-collared heat of the moment,

but nothing, no nothing had ever prepared him
for this, for the firecracker racket that rattled
the air they rode into, the po-faced hilarious crash
of men who could empty an armful of bottles

straight off and not bat an eyelid, the curious
antics of horses in kneeling, or slithering sideways,
or stopping stock-still, which is why he kept pace
with them all the way through to the cannon-line

bouncing the heathery turf and yap-yapping
his head off, a maddening brown-and-white blur
at the corner of everyone’s eye, and then turning round
when the rest of them also turned round, and skittering

back, bounding higher this time to get clear of the men
he could no longer play with, until losing patience,
and anyway puffed with the effort of running
(although the whole business had lasted fifteen

or so minutes at best), and then strutting off
to the stables to sample the tit-bits of dung
he had saved, before a quick session of mousing,
and after that, falling asleep.

Veteran

Across the field, the wood
shudders under lilac cloud
which an hour ago was a bird
and is now a shroud,

draping the leafless trees
with filigree rain-gauze:
a handful of sun flukes
gilding the drab trunks.

My father and I watch:
are we about to catch
a burst of orange afterglow,
or will the evening go

headlong down to night?
With the slow weight
of a man dragging chains
he has managed to remain

on track through his tour
of flashbacks from the war:
three fog-soaked years
of square-bashing and canvas;

the sick, flat-bottomed dash
of D-Day; the frothy wash
of waves inside his tank
as it declined to sink;

the hell for leather advance
when the lanes of France
shrank bottle-tight, blazing;
the ash-wreck of Berlin.

This is by heart, of course,
all at his own pace
now dust has settled again
and fear, grief, boredom, pain

have found a way to fade
into the later life he made.
But I still look at him -
the way his eyes take aim

and hold the wood in focus
just in case anonymous
and twilit-baffled trees
might in fact be enemies

advancing – I look up at him
and cannot estimate the harm
still beating in his head
but hidden in his words.

What might he have done?
What might I have done
frightened for my life
to make my future safe?

Did he kill a man?
Did he fire the gun
with this crumpled finger
which now lifts and lingers

on the swimming glass
and points out how the mass
of cloud above the wood
has melted from a shroud

into a carnival mask?
I never dare to ask.
I would rather not show
the appetite to know

how much of his own self
he shattered on my behalf.
He is my father. My father.
And from him all I gather

are things that he allows
turning from the window
when in time the sky
buries the wood entirely,

then starting my road home
with him at liberty to dream
through the hours before sleep
and the silences he keeps.

Anne Frank Huis

Even now, after twice her lifetime of grief
and anger in the very place, whoever comes
to climb these narrow stairs, discovers how
the bookcase slides aside, then walks through
shadow into sunlit rooms, can never help

but break her secrecy again. Just listening
is a kind of guilt: the Westerkirk repeats
itself outside, as if all time worked round
towards her fear, and made each stroke
die down on guarded streets. Imagine it -

three years of whispering and loneliness
and plotting, day by day, the Allied line
in Europe with a yellow chalk. What hope
she had for ordinary love and interest
survives her here, displayed above the bed

as pictures of her family; some actors;
fashions chosen by Princess Elizabeth.
And those who stoop to see them find
not only patience missing its reward,
but one enduring wish for chances

like my own: to leave as simply
as I do, and walk at ease
up dusty tree-lined avenues, or watch
a silent barge come clear of bridges
settling their reflections in the blue canal.

The Dog of the Light Brigade

We have to remember: when Raglan and others
decided that hour had come, and did as they felt,
and ordered their mess-mates and countrymen -
yes, the noble six hundred, most of whom never

had even so much as imagined what shooting
and shelling were like, away from the Shires,
much less endured it – when they had advanced them
up to the mouth of the innocent valley known later

thanks to the Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson,
thanks be to him, as the Valley of Death, the din
of their bugling and clanking and neighing and stamping
and shouting stretched back to the stables a distance

behind them, and woke there the pampered fox terrier
kept by the men as a mascot, who thinking that this
was the point of his madcap existence, revealed at last,
sprang from his bed among tit-bits of horse-dung,

squeezed through a crack in the ill-hammered planks
of a door, then again through the arms of a boy,
and sped off to join them. This was the dog
who was never surprised in the barracks. Most nights,

indulged with a table-side seat in the mess, he gazed
on the faces of men whose acceptable practice was drink-
ing until one collapsed, whose moustachioed mouths
repeated the same snorting farmyard of noises over and over,

viz: Frenchmen and Russians and women and Prussians
and Turks and women, until they were cancelled,
one by the other, or smudged in the baccy-fug,
wine-fumes and high-collared heat of the moment,

but nothing, no nothing had ever prepared him
for this, for the firecracker racket that rattled
the air they rode into, the po-faced hilarious crash
of men who could empty an armful of bottles

straight off and not bat an eyelid, the curious
antics of horses in kneeling, or slithering sideways,
or stopping stock-still, which is why he kept pace
with them all the way through to the cannon-line

bouncing the heathery turf and yap-yapping
his head off, a maddening brown-and-white blur
at the corner of everyone’s eye, and then turning round
when the rest of them also turned round, and skittering

back, bounding higher this time to get clear of the men
he could no longer play with, until losing patience,
and anyway puffed with the effort of running
(although the whole business had lasted fifteen

or so minutes at best), and then strutting off
to the stables to sample the tit-bits of dung
he had saved, before a quick session of mousing,
and after that, falling asleep.