The Map Room

Surveying time remotely, the sloping smile,

Becomes a marker in the centre of the map room,

A blank-faced, detached reporter, wiring home,

The details of the world pasted on her walls,

Grounding her on the bloodied, newsreel beaches,

Pinned down and showered with the sand kicked up,

By bullets poured down from the cover of the Sphinx,

High on the brutal ridge that cuts the sun in two.

The artillery men, safe behind the lines, recoil,

Detached and separate, like machines to run machines,

They clean and load and pull the string like ballet,

Big guns to smash the ground to pulp and nothing else.

War is ice; the soldier is iconic, sleeves folded,

Measured to the regulation inch above the joint,

Stands against the cut sun and plays in time,

Sweats and follows orders knowing that is all.

We might be skirting Delville Wood, the town gone,

But maps fail in this absence, blinded to those,

That stalk the cracked trees and broken limbers,

The trail of pathfinders marked with the dead.

They come home as The Glorious, forever laurelled,

Marching unseen through the mist and bells of victory,

Then turn up in the mud as ploughed fragments,

Down to the mark of the last man's name forgotten.

If one lost man changes history then what of this?

The map through ages, warped in moments,

Kills a scientific giant, the discoverer of cures,

Steals away a greater poet, the founder of a line.

See how the world wraps itself around its own centre,

In generations committed to the absurd ends of war,

How would this quiet room appear had they lived,

To build a land of better and chosen futures?