If You Have Tears To Shed
Fugitive lives lost one by one
Until he had only a mortal’s chance
A single life left
All that had gone before surrendered
In the nameless forest
Rifle shots scattering the ravens’ host
Wings darker than the night
In the hungry ghetto
Where children starve
Eyes sunken and old
In the camp from which the living never return
Where oven and chimney always burn
On the airfield beneath the sky
Wings broken and burning
As stranded as a mariner far from the sea
On the weary road
A highway to nowhere
The route uncharted
In the prison cell
An ante chamber to hell
Where doors close like coffin lids
In his own home
A fortress once
Now looted and broken
***
Fleeing the hungry spectre
The sorrowful interloper at the feast
The gaunt invader with envious eyes
Forever at his heels the executioner
Sometimes German
Sometimes Russian
Uncle Joe yet more rapacious than the Austrian Corporal
Not once a helping hand, reaching down to pull him up
Arms outstretched like those of a blind man
Searching for interventions that never come
Not from the English
Not from the French
Forlorn pledges as absent as hope itself
Only a harvest of ruin
Broken promises dispersed upon the wind
A sacrament of betrayal
Recanted and denied
I have returned from Germany with peace for our time
***
Dread and fear his constant companions
The God of War’s baleful moons
His despair an apparition that walks before him
A hooded visage leaner than his own
The upended cross of a swastika driven into the ground
A black baptism for a newly anointed apostate
Roaming a godless land
A hollow man, shorn of himself
Waiting to join a congregation of the recently dead
For his bones to be carried away on the unforgiving wind
To gather as golden motes in a shaft of sunlight
Vestigal immortality
Unnoticed and ungrieved by the living
***
Bicycles bent under iron tracks
The barricade breached
The wall surmounted
Cavalry steeds strafed and scattered
The old ways over-ridden by the new
Brigades armed with weapons antique and rusted
Gallantry and honour gone to nothing
Centuries vanquished in less than an hour
And so the soldier on the run
Never to reach a rendezvous
Shot while trying to escape
Shot on the edge of a grave newly dug
Shot on the bomb site where houses once stood
Shot in the alley with no one to see
If you have tears, shed them now
For the dispossessed
For the abandoned
For the forsaken
For the lonely Pole
Nevermore to see the sun
His home
His wife
His children