The Unfamiliar Dead

After the war

In the fog of some inalienable disease

We took the glasses off the dead

No one who was left

Quite knew how to polish lenses

For short sightedness, astigmatism

Or the many other forms of purblind dread

At the funerals our confusion grew

Unsure of whom we laid to rest

In garland and in patriotic finery

Without his bottle-green spectacles

Mr Georgiou could have been

Someone in a turban

Who with flashing cutlass

Once graced the silver screen

Rather than the grocer

Who, shrugging, sold us spoiled cans of beef

Or Philippa Blount who made demands

With a raptor’s air amongst the shelves

Still looked bookish but as if she’d lost

Some twenty years, and was now again a curious girl

Instead of posting accusations with a murderous vehemence

Of those who never went, on the library noticeboard

Captain Magdalene who came home

Mouth stitched with a careful zig-zag smile

In what he nonchalantly called his Siegfried line

Had forgot the authority and rancour

He sometimes shared, about how they shot the horses

Rather than watch our noble beasts enslaved

By Johnny Turk or Frenchmen

Or some other barbarous kind

Seemed to dream behind bare eyes

Of kites and conkers, and of cloud strewn days

When we took off our new glasses

To rub against a ragged sleeve or brisk white handkerchief

We wondered with whose eyes

We did and didn’t see

The living or the dead

How in either could we believe

And if perhaps when we heard

Grand men talk of sacrifice

And we saw instead something withered

With a lolling tongue

Perhaps it might be better

If we returned our glasses to the dead

So we might at least at last

In new bright tears, know them