Nobody Died In 1931

She moves like smoke, a cloud from some Celtic land, bringing gifts and scent from the far world. Her father dug coal in the old days and her brothers followed him down the mine, the main agents of socialism with a view of the future that was better than their present or past. And now we have this compromise, with murder excused in open debate, and no solutions that take less than a week to define. She moves through the door and we ache for something that was promised and will never come, the better world of dishevelled men and women, the tweed-suited politicians form when I first took interest. And all we do is complain about a missing tie or an inappropriate jacket on Remembrance Day. Who still alive came through that? Who cares today? Over the top with straight tie and pressed battle dress is what it’s all about, into the clouds as if on parade, into the gas like a Sunday stroll in autumn. Who dies on days like these? And some desk-man who couldn’t cut it in any military, still refuses the pardons of boys made mad by this war.

She brings home the last one, though not the very last, dead through someone else’s ambition and obedience to something we all believe he cannot control. We would tell those donkeys where to go with their foreign wars and headlong rush for statesmanship. Kick him upstairs? Downstairs more like! Smoke and bearers here, white women carrying the dead they know will never end, carrying the pain of families and the numbness of the rest if us to the fact that men are dying because of a mistake.

It could be a boring Wednesday today but it feels more like Sunday, some autumn Sunday with the wind just strong enough to lift the leaves and send the dry dust up into the shallow sun. This is the worst time for me, something of this feeling due to going back to school, but mostly for itself. All those Sunday hours I could have filled with doing something important or improving and we just damned the stream down by the bridge across the common or threw sticks at the trees. What twelve-year-old boy would write poetry or read a classic? The laureate is mad with his list of books all children should read by fifteen. Maybe the essence of them is correct; they are children’s books written for adults so if you took the stories they would be fine. They have done it with the Odyssey. By red-hot iron, by bound Axe, by suspended rings with a mode of spinning; one of these things will tell the future. Let us take out the eye of the Cyclops; by blinding him we clear our own vision for the smoke from the altar which indicates her passing through here, the dead guardian of soldiers gone to earth, to dust, to muddy fields for feet of worthless ground that belongs to no one who fights for it.

It is shady summer now. The two of us lie in heat under some tree out of sight of our parents occupied with real things, black-and-white things on paper that tell our future and how bad a place the rest of the world is. Why don’t they emigrate to somewhere better than this? We could all go and live in some dusty shack on the Steppes, living of potatoes and vodka, waving a red flag every Friday to show our loyalty to collective. No, we will stay here in this land, this greenly padded countryside, with the rain and the wind and the snow and this ever-lasting summer. We sledged over the dry, grassy hill, remarked on by the people we met on the way there. Down over the hill feeling like honourable children staying with the arch-duke and so privileged to be happy and rich at this time. And we were between wars, thinking the worst mud was gone and we were safe, not seeing the shadows, the darkness over the hill, promising us real snow for the sledge rather than this sweaty compromise.

The flower girl is here again, poor but happy as they say on the continent. The white petals pour like snow from her basket, making a trail, a line of where she has been or maybe where she will go now we have time in our control. Who died has hit me now though the girl carries on not knowing this. They have taught me the back-and-forth of the last war, the failed assaults and the last push that led to failure and an ending after all. I began to hear of the poor boys shot for being afraid and know it all fails when you begin to fight yourself. Imagine the horror of that death, how they word the notification and then leave you to the shame that lasts a century. Pardon them all, even the mad conscript running from that bloody idiot and his pointing finger. Like me. I am a coward. You want to kill me for it?