Cathedral light

diffused

into a thousand breath hush

exquisitely painful

as Alfie’s song lingers

bring him home

and visions of bayonets

under chins

for tired boys

and frightened children

shot for deserting

a mother wracked

with disallowed grief

a father in anguish

for colluding

with the enforced patriotism

bring him home

and 200 girls are stolen

stashed like mice

whilst we view the peaceful fields

the eerie beautiful silence

drifting over the mounds

of buried bones and bombs

‘better she is dead’

her father prays she is

and when the soldier walks home

is it better

he is not dead?

his memories enveloped

in delicate neurons

private, unseeable

and can conspire with himself

to ignore and bury

unless they haunt him

have broken him

and the father of the girl knows

his ghost is ready to haunt him

and is visiting the unspeakable place

of the darkest deeds

only angels and devils can bear

he knows he cannot live

with the knowledge pending

and what war now

does not break and fill our men with ghosts

the men we hail

but then leave

hanging

in the barbed wire

of history

abandoned

to their fate

to their visions

no other can know

no other can fathom

and so there, hanging still

a yellow spotlight of a streetlamp

their new torture

bring him home

to a place of silence

where pictures with sounds

have space to shout

louder than the ear can bear

sleeping, as breaths of 1000 children slumber

incongruity is the impossible norm

walking away from the war world

to climb the steps of a jumbo

to a ground called home

to be left hanging

on the barbed wire

called silence