November 2020 -- A whole Heap of Other Stuff -- No3 -- All Saints to Armistice

Two poems for you: 'We will remember them.'

“No words of mine can soften the blow. There is one consolation for you - your daughter became unconscious immediately after she was hit, and she passed away perfectly peacefully.” - From the letter written by matron Minnie Wood to the parents of staff nurse Nellie Spindler, 1917.

Women of Passchendaele

For the Passchendaele nurse there was no drill,

no readiness for what she must confront

trying to keep her uniform pristine

negotiating boards from tent to tent

she saw the soldier, half his face blown off,

looked on him as might mother, sister, wife

she dragged him from a shell hole still alive

and gave him sips of water ‘til he died

one day she was a surgeon in the field

the next she scribed a diary for the dead

her knees would not stop trembling but her hand

wrote words of consolation to his kin

unconscious moments after the blast

she passed away peacefully at the last

First published in The Linnet's Wings THE SORROW  2018 WWI Centenary Issue 

Men of Passchendaele
 
See, the flood flows under a crazy moon
and warps the planks we laid across the mud.
Eyes loom perpetual, watery in the gloom
beneath the stars amid the smell of blood.

Tree stumps like empty signposts yield
nothing; but stand like sentries at hell's door.
Entrenched, abandoned in the field
our hopes that wars should be no more.

We trample the knowledge that death is unkind.
Life is the next cigarette and a hard won mile.
Impervious now to shellfire, eyes forever blind
meet ours that cannot weep and cannot smile.

First Published in Bewildering Stories Issue 741: 2018