Part XVI and Guest Poet 11 - A CENTENARY WAR POEM by Attila the Stockbroker

(Into the second half we go now, and this next piece tells the story through the eyes of the young shop assistant who we met earlier.

Our 11th Guest Poet needs no introduction from me, the legend that is Attila the Stockbroker who makes his second appearance in two years on my ghost story poems)

XVI

Numbed leaves

Cut across her feet

When she told them

Of how brave he’d been

When the bullets

Knocked her off

The display counter,

Bandaging themselves

Around her

Bridging half truths

Flattened in memory

Of forced levity

Retiringly dry

Stumbling out in sentences

‘I owe him my life

before concluding

she thought she’d heard

another voice

rippling in the background

contracted out

almost of nothing

minutes later.

A CENTENARY WAR POEM

For Bill Baine, 1899-1968

1/15th Battalion, London Regiment , soldier number 535068

‘What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.’

And so some lines to spike centenary prattle:

These words a sole survivor soldier’s son’s. 

My father Bill, born in Victorian England: 

The sixth of January, 1899.

His stock, loyal London. Proletarian doff-cap.

Aged seventeen, he went to join the line.

Not in a war to end all wars forever

Just in a ghastly slaughter at the Somme -

A pointless feud, a royal family squabble

Fought by their proxy poor with gun and bomb.

My father saved. Pyrexia, unknown origin.

Front line battalion: he lay sick in bed.

His comrades formed their line, then came the whistle 

And then the news that every one was dead.

In later life a polished comic poet

No words to us expressed that awful fear

Although we knew such things were not forgotten.

He dreamed Sassoon: he wrote Belloc and Lear. 

When I was ten he died, but I remember,

Although just once, he’d hinted at the truth.

He put down Henry King and Jabberwocky

And read me Owen’s ‘Anthem For Doomed Youth’. 

‘What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.’

And so some lines to spike Gove’s mindless prattle:

These words a sole survivor soldier’s son’s.

Attila the Stockbroker