NORWEGIAN BATTLE

 

 

Dull metallic monster sitting on the bottom, forty fathoms

down, crushing weight of black water. Cold as death

and as frigid as eternity, never ending. An endless circle.

Now the battle is over, good against evil. Silent guns end

their killing, no more bomb bursts, killing shrapnel, sliced corpses.

Time has no hold here in Nature’s unforgiving dark

world, on this lake bottom a million miles from home.

Many times the ice formed a metre thick, imprisoning

the broken metal bird in its watery grave.

Come the spring and the ice will peter out, escape is a distant dream.

In Man’s world, a new chapter is written. A warplane is raised

from the fjord bottom, broken and defeated but not forgotten.

Old enemies die and old warriors remember a night long ago

when great machines clashed and explosives discharged,

turning land, sea and sky to fire. Killing men who screamed

for their mothers as death came to claim them.

Now sitting in a museum, people look at the broken

plane and wonder, how did it become like this?