Waiting, Stripling, Strafing…
(From Catrìona Reid’s painting…)
Whistle clutched in cold fingers, hacked gloves cover only grimy palms.
Helmet harsh against skull, sore on scraped, shaved chin and face.
Waiting…
Sweat ripe on itching skin, yet cold as ice. Arms
Tensed, rifle clutched, muck stained boots scrabbling for space.
Hating.
Tree, incongruous, stripped of all foliage, silhouetted against a deluge.
A maelstrom of explosives, smoke, dust and deafening noise.
A stripling.
Watch so slow on filthy wrist, crawls towards the advance from refuge
And maiming and death and hell, as I strain to hold poise.
A grappling.
I blow.
The whistle is barely heard.
I scramble from the trench
Into the unknown, into the gas, into the unnerving.
Men follow.
My yells lead the herd.
I tumble into a stench,
Into a hole, into a gaping corpse, into a strafing…
And the crooked tree survives.
And will no doubt thrive.
And the gaseous vortex heaves,
Its casualties to leave…
Pete Ray
3rd May 2021
Looking at the painting brought to mind WW1 and a gaseous mass, fronted by a bare, winter, silhouetted tree.
I thought of a young Captain, about to lead his men to injury or death…
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