Burma Casualty

(To Capt. G.T. Morris, Indian Army)

I

Three endless weeks of sniping all the way,
Lying up when their signals rang too close,
Ooeee, Ooee, like owls, the lynx-eyed Jap,
Sleeplessly watching, knifing, falling back.
And now the Sittang river was there at last
And the shambles of trucks and corpses round the bridge
And the bridge was blown. And he laughed.

And then a cough of bullets, a dusty cough
Filleted all his thigh from knee to groin.
The kick of it sucked his face into the wound.
He crumpled, thinking 'Death'. But no, not yet.
The femoral artery wasn't touched.
Great velour cloaks of darkness floated up.
But he refused, refused the encircling dark,
A lump of bitter gristle that refused.
The day grew bloodshot as they picked him up.

II

Lying in hospital he often thought
Of that darkness, whence it came
And how it played the enchantress in a grain
Of morphia or a nodding of the head
Late in the night and offered to release
The Beast that breathed with pain and ran with pus
Among the jumping fibres of the flesh.
And then he saw the Padre by his cot
With the Last Unction: and he started up.

III

Your leg must go. Okay?" the surgeon said
"Take it' he said. T hate the bloody thing."
Yet he was terrified - not of the knives
Nor loosing that green leg (he'd often wished
He'd had a gun to shoot the damned thing off)
But of the darkness that he knew would come
And bid him enter its deep gates alone.

The nurse would help him and the orderlies.
But did they know? And could a rubber tube
Suck all that darkness out of lungs and heart?
Open and lose your fist - slowly the doctor said.
He did so, lying still upon his back.
The whitewashed walls, the windows bright with sky
Gathered a brilliant light above his head.
Here was the light, the promise hard arnd pure,
His wife's sweet body and her wilful eyes.
Her timeless love stooped down to raise him up.
He felt the white walls part - the needle pricked,
Ten seconds and you'll fade,' the doctor said.
He lay and looked into the snowwhite skies
For all ten seconds means at such a time.
Then through the warped interstices of life
The darkness swept like water through a boat
In gouts and waves of softness, claiming him...

He went alone: knew nothing: and returned
Retching and blind with pain, and yet Alive.

IV

Mending, with books and papers and a fan
Sunlight on parquet floors and bowls of flame
He heard quite casually that his friends were dead,
His reginment too butchered to reform.
And he lay in the lightness of the ward
Thinking of all the lads the dark enfolds
So secretly.
And yet a man may walk
Into and through it, and return alive.
Why had his friends all stayed there, then?
He knew.
The dark is a beautiful singing sexless angel
Her hands so soft you scarcely feel her touch
Gentle, eternally gentle, round your heart.
She flatters and unsexes every man.

And Life is only a crude, pigheaded churl
Frowsy and starving, daring to suffer alone.