The Golden Mean Read Online Free

with rage.
    Each morningshe makes his bed;
    lays fresh clothesacross a chair.
    She’ll not speakhis name again.
    Her stare isa hard, black sloe.
    If fine rhymesrang like iron,
    hammered bright,hot with meaning
    they might weighmore in my heart.
    Brave songs don’tbring the dead home;
    they damn themto cross that dour
    black stream whereyon pale boatman
    waits and foulfoundries spit and
    silence istheir only song.
    When we goto his grave, I’ll
    bring sorrel,because I know
    the dead arealways drouthy –
    their dry mouthsclotted with dust.
    I’ll say sorryson, this plant
    slakes onlythe one, small thirst;
    may its briefwhite blossom
    linger uponyour grave, like snow.

The Big Push
    after Sir Herbert James Gunn, ‘The Eve of the Battle of the Somme’
    Would you believe it, there’s a bloke out there singing
    â€˜When You Come to the End of a Perfect Day’ .
    His audience, a sixty-pounder crew, stand round bleeding
    from the ears. The Boche are all but finished, apparently –
    I heard they’re packing old clock parts into trench mortars
    now, for want of iron scrap. Some wag quips that next time he’s
    sentry and hears the plop of a minenwerfer tumbling over,
    he’ll not blow the alarm, he’ll shout: ‘Time, gentlemen, please  . . .  ’
    We laugh and for one heartbeat forget to be afraid. Bravery
    and cowardice are just two workings of the same fear
    moving us in different ways. The 8th East Surreys
    have been given footballs to kick and follow at Zero Hour;
    it’s to persuade them from the trenches lest their nerve fail
    as they advance on Montaubon. I’ve watched men
    hitch up their collars and trudge forward as if shrapnel
    and lead were no worse than a shower of winter rain.
    This afternoon a few of us went swimming in the mill dam
    behind Camp. Just for a while to have no weight, to go drifting
    clear of thought and world, was utter bliss. A skylark climbed
    high over the torn fields on its impossible thread of song:
    â€˜like an unbodied joy .’ I don’t know why, but it reminded
    me of the day we took over from the French along the Somme;
    it was so tranquil, so picturesque, the German trenchworks crowded
    with swathes of tiny, brilliant flowers none of us could name.
    I believe if the dead come back at all they’ll come back green
    to grow from the broken earth and drink the gathered water
    and all the things they suffered will mean no more to them
    than the setting-in of the ordinary dark, or a change of weather.

Rubble
    General term for a people who are harvested and reused
    or broken. To be heaped randomly or roughly stored.
    That which is held for common use. Infill. Of little worth.
    Break them in different ways but they will always be the same.
    Hold them in the dark; remind yourself why they should stay forgotten.
    These days there is little interest in stones that bear names.
    May they be piled up and given this title in common.
    Let them take their place in the register of unspoken things.
    May they never be acknowledged again.

Our Dad
    After he’d passed over, she buried all his séance books.
    Said she was comfortable with the notion of the Afterlife
    but had no use for it on her parlour shelf. It felt worse
    than burning somehow – imagine words gasping for air,
    their loosened pages mouldering back to soil and dirt.
    In the thirties, he was a regular at Circle meetings in some
    North London suburb, but didn’t believe in an afterlife
    or the Spirit Realm, that sunlit somewhere after death.
    It was the showmanship he loved: all that cheerless
    determination, cotton wool and wire; all that nifty
    fiddling with lights. Let death be always nothing more
    than sleight of hand. One flurry of white doves
    and the earth-strewn dead spring back into our lives,
    gaping and astonished. Cue the applause. Amen to that.

The Iraqi Elements
    after Zaher Mousa
    This is the birth of Water:
    Mist is when water dies