{a poem for Remembrance Sunday}

 

We were the shield-wall, here at the barrow’s edge

The first wave the enemy met, and broke on:

They buried us, when we had fallen, in

Earth, always the warrior’s last billet. When and

 

Where we had fallen. Sword, spear and shield

We held in death, as we had done in life –

Sword pommel still gripped in bony fingers.

Still ready, side by side, grave goods

Within the reach of each skeletal arm.

 

Years, and then more years, more wars, passed over us, above:

As slowly, Wessex turned to Dorset, though the land remained.

Above us, fields were ploughed, crops grew:

We nourished them, at first. Then houses,

Towns, and things we had not names for.

 

Our faces are skulls now, with  

Eye-sockets as empty

As the Sutton Hoo helmet; our beards,

Once stiff as bronze, are gone, all gone.

 

Yet still we hold the line; Orm, Gamal’s son,

Leofwine, Wulf, and Widurok, beside me still,

Just as when we roared on the mead-bench.

Just as we stood, that day, our dawn-breath streaming,

Gripping our weapons, bracing for the clash.

 

Discoloured iron, mixed with vertebrae, our legacy;

Broad wood, once seasoned, pegged, now split and withered

By centuries of damp, crumbles beside our ribs,

Eventually, to a dark stain in the soil.

 

And now, you have come, with your trowels and careful hands,

And your wagons that need no oxen.

Scraping away obscuring years, restoring us

And documenting our postures, our rictus;

Every bone enumerated, logged,

Seeking to understand.  Let us explain -

 

For us, the dead it is quite simple: always the same -

The woman by the hearth, the man strides out

Sword-swaggering.  Your new maps may have changed

The land, as we emerge, blinking in new light.

 

But layers of dead are added by each fight…