Gunner

Selected Poems (1955)

Did they send me away from my cat and my wifeTo a doctor who poked me and counted my teeth,To a line on a plain, to a stove in a tent?Did I nod in the flies of the schools?And the fighters rolled into the tracer like rabbits,The blood froze over my splints like a scab —Did I snore, all still and grey in the turret,Till the palms rose out of the sea with my death?And the world ends here, in the sand of a grave,All my wars over? How easy it was to die!Has my wife a pension of so many mice?Did the medals go home to my cat?

Soldiers. Selected Poems (1955)