Not that one, not the one you
Watched on tv. The
Battle. Sturdee...
Admiral Graf Spee;
No, not the ship,
The man. The
Admiral Graf Spee,
Expunged, pumiced , remaining
Only in palimpsest, fainter by the day.
And fainter still the dolorous stroke -
Sir Galahad suffering in a desolate
South Atlantic bay, far from any
Camelot.

The Somme, smoothed,
Slides beneath tarmac
As a new airport for
Paris; the front,
Wrinkled and trenched
With barbed lines, flickers
Indistinctly in
Hallucinatory newsreels
Lacking soundtracks.
Jets outstrip the
Tired five-nines.

Tennyson survives, intoning
"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
On a wax cylinder.
Time hisses him
To incoherence.
Brahms, playing badly,
May be heard jangling
Behind the nightingale,
True object of
Herr Koch's recording, the song
Of the long-dead bird
Tormented into
Crackling shrillness.

Let landscape
Be smoothed into
Modernity.
Polish the wax cylinder,
Rase your tables
And cut
New lines on
What seems a clean sheet.
Or simply delete.

The photograph is
Returning to grey, but
The soldier on the white horse
Is my father's grandfather,
Entering Jerusalem with
Allenby.

---

Stuart Airlie's poem "Love and Violence in a Grey Place" appeared in the Winter 2002 issue of Offcourse.