Here we go round the prickly pear

[sovay]

"Follow Me Home" is now online at Lone Star Stories.

This is a strange poem for me to read over. It was written in mid-November, when hans_the_bold was staying with me; so far as I can tell, its initial image descended from a dream I'd had in the last week of October (From the next night, all I can remember is a man hanged on barbed wire against the sunset, in the midst of incredible carnage, with King Haggard's unsurprised smile), but I don't know how it transformed from a slightly futuristic battlefield to the trenches of the First World War. The whole week after I'd finished the piece, I read solidly through Wilfred Owen, David Jones, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon. As an exorcism, it didn't work.

(My brother's best friend returned this summer from Iraq. At barely twenty-one, he's a veteran with decorations and scars and he doesn't sleep well at night. For Christmas, I gave him the complete poems of Wilfred Owen, and he already knew "Dulce Et Decorum Est." His commanding officer in country had kept a copy tacked up beside his bed.)

The song that accompanies the poem, although it's the wrong war, is Carol Noonan's "Medal of Mine." I played it looking for a title and then it wouldn't leave my head.

When they buried him in the ground so cold
They dressed him in his uniform bold
And his Mary cries and she's all alone
Said he died for his country and he died for his own

They were twenty-one and twenty-two
With their hearts so full and their hearts so true
With his hair of black and her eyes of blue
When she took his hand to say "I do"

She always believed in forever
She told him in every love letter
He was fighting the war that would never
Bring him home again

When they shipped him home, it was Christmas time
With a picture of Mary and a medal of mine
And I moaned when they told me, I prayed that they'd lied
And I wished it was someone else's Johnny who'd died

I always believed in forever
I told him in every love letter
He was fighting the war that would never
Bring him home again

There's a baby born in forty-two
With her hair of black and her eyes of blue
Mary wonders how she'll love her too
With a broken heart and a faint "I do"

She always believed in forever
She told him in every love letter
He was fighting the war that would never
Bring him home again


I hope I did somebody justice with this one.

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

The black crows work well with your poem.

Nine

[sovay]

The black crows work well with your poem.

Which? squid_soup's Ornithaceous Period?

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

I meant the monochromatic Van Gogh; but the cardinal crows are fabulous. ("No one expects the Cloudish Inquisition!")

Nine

[sovay]

I meant the monochromatic Van Gogh

I didn't recognize "Wheatfield with Crows" in black and white—I saw churned-up abstracts and mud shadows and a road that doesn't come back. ericmarin told me its name. It is perfect, especially since I almost called the poem "A Field of Clay."

("No one expects the Cloudish Inquisition!")

Apparently they belong to a poem of greygirlbeast's, which I can't wait to read.