LET’S SOLDIER ON
The old platitude we use again and again
though it means less and less as time goes by.
We must pay the price for having loved so deeply.
Would it have been better not having loved at all?
To have kept our distance from others and ourselves,
not living but going through the motions of a life.
Hello, Goodbye, ships passing in the night
and the cold sea between us. Little lights in the distance.
Destinations unknown.
Flares in the darkness;
not for mariners now but soldiers on the fields of death
waiting for their officer’s command, revolver in hand,
facing the recalcitrant and fearful.
‘We soldier on,’ he barks. ‘You can’t go back or stay.
Fix bayonets, get ready for the fray.’
STOKER JOE
Battered by time and ailments of the flesh,
sleepless pondering the loved dead
and all the unknown dead en masse.
In the factory boiler room where he worked
Stoker Joe kept his eye on the gauge
to know when he should shovel more.
The air inside was dense with sawdust,
timber waste, the heat infernal. Stoker Joe
wore no mask and cared the less.
He hardly spoke to a single soul.
The roaring blaze and thrum of pump
were his sole concern at the hellgate of his work.
But once he spoke of war and what he’d seen.
If you think this is hell, he said, you are mistaken.
The bayonet charge was worse by far for those forsaken.
Michael Smith’s “Collected Poems” have been published by Shearsman Books, as have his many translations from the Spanish, including the Collected Poems of Cesar Vallejo. He is a member of Aosdána.
