vagantes
04-06-2009, 11:31 AM
Come out of Dolphin Square and there's the Cenotaph;
Behind me in the busy crowd an English voice
Droned on about the war and his dead friends;
To my left a market full of thieves and hucksters.
As the band played tears rolled down my wife's face:
Her father, three years a prisoner, when released found
At home a loving wife who cradled in her arms
A six month baby girl that should have been aborted,
But still lives on today, damaged and deformed
And in her imbecility mocks the panoply of war.
Her eldest, not mine, moulders in San Carlos,
Drowned when those ships were blown apart.
While my friend with yellow hair, who wrote sad poems
Lies in a grave at Radfan where Rimbaud worked.
The rain increased and in front of me an old man,
In his eighties, stood rigid and erect as the gutters flooded.
One step backward and he would be out of it,
But as the bugle sounded he refused to move
Locked to attention as the water rose above his shoe.
I screamed inside my head to make him understand
That the dead neither know nor care what we feel;
But he would not move until the quiet moment passed.
Afterward on the Malta 'bus we chatted, then fell silent.
The storm passed and the bright sun shone
As a rainbow arced its length across the sky.
Behind me in the busy crowd an English voice
Droned on about the war and his dead friends;
To my left a market full of thieves and hucksters.
As the band played tears rolled down my wife's face:
Her father, three years a prisoner, when released found
At home a loving wife who cradled in her arms
A six month baby girl that should have been aborted,
But still lives on today, damaged and deformed
And in her imbecility mocks the panoply of war.
Her eldest, not mine, moulders in San Carlos,
Drowned when those ships were blown apart.
While my friend with yellow hair, who wrote sad poems
Lies in a grave at Radfan where Rimbaud worked.
The rain increased and in front of me an old man,
In his eighties, stood rigid and erect as the gutters flooded.
One step backward and he would be out of it,
But as the bugle sounded he refused to move
Locked to attention as the water rose above his shoe.
I screamed inside my head to make him understand
That the dead neither know nor care what we feel;
But he would not move until the quiet moment passed.
Afterward on the Malta 'bus we chatted, then fell silent.
The storm passed and the bright sun shone
As a rainbow arced its length across the sky.