Exposure

• Our brains ache in the merciless iced east winds that knife us…
• Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous, But nothing happens.
• Twitching agonies of men among its brambles
• Mad gusts tugging on the wire
• Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war
• What are we doing here?
• The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow
• We only know war lasts, rain soaks and clouds sag stormy
• Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army
• But nothing happens
• Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow
• The winds nonchalance
• Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces
• We cringe in holes back on forgotten dreams and stare snow dazed
• So we drowse, sun-dozed
• Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses
• Is it that we are dying?
• Slowly our ghosts drag home
• we turn back to our dying
• nor ever suns smile true on child or field or fruit
• Our love is made afraid
• Tonight this frost will fasten on this mud and us
• The burying party picks and shovels in shaking grasp
• Half-known faces
• All their eyes are ice