In the hollow hours before dawn unfolds,
crickets relinquish their chorus to tanks,
and dew on wildflowers trembles at the periphery
of a world newly ruptured. I walk the old country road –
hedges surrendered to gunfire,
yet scarlet poppies still insist on dawn,
their roots entwined unseen, quietly knitting the uncertainties
of battered soil.
Here, exhausted men become echoes,
disguised as uniforms, files of memory
marching to other people’s drums.
Somewhere, a general draws lines through a map –
bloodless on paper,
impossible in reality,
as if rivers could forget their courses,
as if mountains could ignore their bones.
Yet I have seen it –
in hospital tents, where fever does not ask
whose name a soldier once bore –
fingers trembling the same along the ridge
of a borrowed tin cup, the desperate thirst
equal in every language.
Children, somewhere, gather the shrapnel for playthings
or stare, uncomprehending, at the holes in their homes –
the absurdity of shells falling unbidden from rainless skies,
and mothers weep in a dialect that needs no translation,
her lament pooled and shared among nations.
If, on a silent battlefield, you brush aside the husks of bullets,
you might find a scrap of a letter:
“Tell Anna I love her, and kiss the baby for me.”
Does it matter whose hand scrawled it,
whose breath shaped each syllable?
Does the earth weigh one grief more heavily than another,
or do all our sorrows compost the same hallowed ground?
Listen – past the percussive roar and the speeches,
a pulse persists, old as the sea,
ignoring boundaries and uniforms.
We are written into the same dust,
our laughter and terror pressed
by the same indifferent moonlight.
No border is visible from the cold orbit above,
no anthem audible except the rush of blood in the ear.
Might we one day lay down armament and anthem,
question the names and numbers assigned to us,
see, at last, the impossible strangeness
that we are spinning together,
round and round, one shared blue planet
freighted with fevered dreams tending toward dawn –
and recognise, in every mirrored gaze,
a kinship unfit for dividing,
vast as the sky we have always shared
beneath our fragile, hopeful stars?
