Elisabeth Wentworth: Two Poems

Service Records

 

Complexion: dark, colour of eyes: grey,

Oath taken: January 1915, so help him God,

Discharged out the other side: October 1918.

To piece together the rest, I have to learn Army.

 

Gassed in Action.

Taken On Strength.

Gun Shot Wounds.

The sequence repeats—

 

Like a malevolent scratch in the record.

He brought his final wound home

And grandfathered me. I try to line up

The dates with a history of his Battalion

 

I’ve cobbled together, from anything within reach

Of a holiday laptop on a Bass Coast deck

Overlooking a peacetime beach.

A pair of blue wrens awaits the result.

 

When the records align I see: Gallipoli,

The Somme,

Passchendaele.

Dear God, no wonder he hated parades.

 

His first charge was insolence to a British NCO—

A lifetime of insubordination explained?

But the timelines tell me he’d been

Three months on Turkish beaches by then

 

And my self-congratulation falls away.

I have to search Navy/Disgrace to understand

His last charge, of smoking between decks.

A terrible crime, it seems, for a much-wounded private

 

On a depleted troopship, almost home.

I see a young dark-haired boy with grey eyes

The gas and the gunfire behind him

The small victory of holding his own cigarette

 

Pausing to contemplate the possibilities

Of an entire hand—a man might still marry

If only he can forget the mud and the madness

And learn the veteran’s prayer—

 

Lest we remember.

 

Elisabeth Wentworth

 

 

 

 

On Bravery

i.m. Kenneth James Oxley

 

Be reassured, no-one who is brave

Ever knows it at the time. My father

In his pithy Mancunian way

Said that bravery is stupidity

With a happy ending.

It is not-thinking-acting, impulse-propelled

 

The brain left far behind. Stuff

Of our mothers’ nightmares.

Diving into unknown water to retrieve

A child. Shielding a stranger’s body with your own. Engaging a wild-eyed madman (with a gun?)

In conversation about the weather.

 

Be liberated from the burden

Others want you to carry for them.

You need take no credit.

You need never do it again.

It cannot be explained. Embarrassment

Is an appropriate emotion. Pride can wait.

 

You were stupid/you were brave

A heartbeat between the two.

 

Elisabeth Wentworth