Roger G McDonald: ‘Demobilisation blues’ and ‘The silence of the farms’

Demobilisation blues

Of the squad, only one went mad,
his brain ballistically kissed.
His beggar’s choice: mind and body,
servants of paralysis.

Of the three, only one went bad.
How else to make a living?
Debts of war are not debts of love.
Who profits from forgiving?

Of the two, only one was glad
To re-embrace the land.
He ploughed the primitive furrow
With his progeny at hand.

Leaving one, who was jointly mad
and bad and glad and sad;
who proved, drunk, with his gun’s roulette,
that poor justice could be had.

Roger G McDonald

The silence of the farms

His age hailed from rural stock.
He breathed the earth and always was
more connected with hen and cock
and horse and sheep and soil because

they whispered to him honestly.
A big family couldn’t share
one farm. That’s how the travesty
of dispossession took him where

no guileless farm boy ought to go.
He drifted to the cruel city,
made half a life; helped make us, though
he rarely spoke. There’s the pity.

Roger G McDonald