Mike Barlow

Diplomacy

Word is they're talking. But armies don't talk.
They mutter, they grumble, they seethe.
We’ve had it to here, stood to in dug-outs and rubble,
the sweat of the day, the bone cold frost of each night,
a platoon of duckers and divers in the other side’s sights.

And stood down in the camp, all the briefings and drill,
the press-ups and card games, what does it come to?
It comes to a point when letters from home cut you off,
when hearts and kisses aren't matched by the words on the page,
when your daughter’s drawings are maps of intrigue

and your wife someone else's, someone you no longer are,
a skin of a former self shed in a season
of snatched sleep and squints through the green glare
of nightsights, your homesick and half-awake mind half-
tuned to the guy to your right, his black jokes, faraway heart.

Posthumous

(1)
There’s my face on the mantelpiece,
a smile in its gilt frame, a medal in its case.
I’m a word spoken softly now:

I might be to blame for something,
or I might be in the kitchen
eavesdropping, ready to burst through

with a corny old joke, mugs of tea
and plates of sausage and chips, ready
to make sense out of nonsense again.

I’m holding my breath all the time.
The longer I stay the more I fear
I’ll get in the way.

But her anger, it boxes me in.
And another thing. When our daughter
brushes my knee or our son

walks through me its like being tickled
and not being free to laugh or wriggle
or join in or push them away.

(2)
Once he lay above the duvet
in full kit: webbing, boots, the lot.
I smelt diesel, metal
and something I couldn’t put my finger on:
sweat perhaps, not his, anyone’s.

He wakes me all hours now,
his warmth nudging me, wanting it.
I roll over on top and the chill
of his absence takes my breath away.

Bridge

A temporary span of girders
crosses grey sluggish water,
a link from one zone to another —
a town still eating itself alive
to one already a carcass.
All that’s left of the old medieval bridge:
the shattered molars of its piers
jutting from the river. Yesterday
you were advised to leave.
Today you stand midstream
taking photographs of burnt-out flats
and disused sidings. Traffic lights
still regulate the empty streets.
The occasional figure hurries past.
Any moment now one of them will stop,
take you firmly by the elbow, insist
they escort you to the other side.

Fugitive

Each night I sleep in a different house,
a rich man’s divan or an old crone’s
sacking on a lino floor. Each night
it’s prayers to a different god, food
for an alien soul. But each night
it’s the same dream. I’m flying
above a city that goes on forever.
I look down on side-streets and alleys,
snickets and shortcuts at figures
running this way and that, glancing back
over shoulders and crouching to hide
at a cough or footsteps or snatches of talk.
And just as I wake, it’s always the same,
they’re my friends, the friends
I grew up with. For Alice and Louis,
Isaac, Ahmed and Hans, trying to reach
a safe house to dream in, I hold my breath
and pray to a different god each night.

The Brown Room

The voices are not here in the room.
Only my grandmother, reading
and patting her perm and looking up
from time to time to smile a papery smile,
and my grandfather sucking at his pipe
and clearing his throat to spit,
and my mother sewing and not looking up.

The voices come from another world,
not this brown world with its bottlegreen
tassled chenille table cover, but a world
of echoes and crackles, of happenings
not happening here, a world held
in a polished box with a small grimace of light.
Stiff voices, cruel-to-be-kind voices,
voices with music and sometimes laughter,
though nothing sounds funny.

What the words say makes no sense at all.
But it’s the voices I’ll remember,
reaching into the room where no one speaks
and no one seems to listen. Theirs is a sound
I learn by heart — war memories:
making their own strange sense when inally
my father comes home with his terrible reticence.