Before the day closes, here is my act of remembrance. Back in 2014, this poem was inspired by the statue of an Unknown Soldier in Paddington Station. The Tommy is wearing a long hand-knit scarf over his uniform and reading a letter, perhaps from home.
Scarf
Her
tapped-out knit-one-purl
was
a private Morse code
as
much lullaby as distress-call
between
Field Service Postcards
from
France. Her autumn spent
picking
up and slipping stitches
to
shoulder you from afar.
Today
it is a coil of python
a
slithering bundle of welted yarn
wrapping
your jugular: a ribbed
belt
of bullets machine-gun issue
pulling
your bowed head to assent.
Then
it was a muffler, her umbilical
shawl
of twice-ravelled wool
that
clicked and twitched
over
many a clock-ticked night
into
a candlewick fabric, elastic
boy-looped,
long as a man:
a
fleece itching with unsaid words
still
warm with smells of her.
Did
she cosset you, Tommy?
Fuss
and mither you? Dab
spittle
to polish you, tidy a wisp
of
hair under your trench cap
when
you defied her at last
and
donned Kitchener's Blue?
Before
this tasselled winding-cloth
you
lay cat's cradled in a weft
of
barbed-wire bindweed
that
snagged on her name and stuck
for
the two days it took to die.
A
jagged casting-off attended by
No
Man's rats and bluebottles.
Your
fingers laced around her letter
in
a certain light, are
skeletal
but
stubby nails, bent eyelashes
and
boy-man jutting chin, are molten
unresolved,
alive in metal.
Published in the Letters to an Unknown Soldier Anthology, ed. by Kate Pullinger & Bartlett Nov. 2014. Written as part of a residency I led for 14-18-NOW and WEM in August 2014.
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