Sanctuary For Despair…
There was no facility to want.
Despair had engulfed any hopes of survival harboured.
He had forgotten what having a choice meant.
Opinions were worthless, even those within his dulled mind.
Facial expressions of feeling discouraged were now spent.
He had become expressionless, his stare askant,
Culled of emotion, blank and resigned, effectively blind…
There was no longer any empathy.
Death had bled any caring he had once harboured.
He existed now in a filthy, stinking apathy.
Dispensable, he reacted to orders, however inane.
Camaraderie was a myth, he was devoid of all sympathy.
He had become humourless, feeble and unworthy,
Lulled into an acceptance of an existence insane…
Thus he mistrusts the estaminet, its wooden chairs,
Its scarred tables and freshly ground coffee.
He misses the grime, the rats, the noise, the wait
For death, the itching and his own introversion…
He shuns companions whose feelings he no longer shares,
He weeps no tears from eyes wild and wary.
He craves the mire, the trench, his fate
And the horrors of his irrefutable repulsion…
Pete Ray
3rd February 2023
Trying to imagine an infantryman, completely devoid of all feeling after time spent at ‘the front’ and unable to come to terms with a French café behind the lines and thereby needing to return to where his fate lies…
The image of the soldier beneath the title is of my paternal grandfather.
I wonder whether he ever felt the same way...
I never met him.
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