Hawthorn

In memory of Private James Crozier
executed in Picardie, 27 February 1916

There is no question of day breaking
suddenly—one minute slow darkness,
the next sunlight like a blind drawn up.
There is seepage. A thing not happening
because it happens too gradually to show.
Although in either case what is revealed
remains the same: a tipped-up half-acre
confined by fence posts and barbed wire;
the brown weight of a recent cloudburst
smearing down grass at the steepest angle;
one clump of last year’s unraveling clover;
a skyline of trees like exclamation marks;
and staggering at dead centre a hawthorn
managing to hold its ground but barely.

*

The hawthorn has been cringing forward
like a seriously shy child who never meant
to be the subject of this or any photograph.
A child who in the space of a few yards grew
into an adult and lost control—boiled-up hair,
flapping rags of a trench coat, damp muttering
How did I get here, who am I, why am I here
alone, but still beautiful as battalions of cloud
parade overhead in their dull grey uniforms,
keeping the allowance of light to a minimum
which is enough nevertheless to show sharp
spikes of frost prickling the hawthorn’s hands
clasped to its face even when a breeze arrives
and seeks to loosen them, fails, and sweeps on.

*

Except no one can ever find this beautiful now,
things being as they are, not that the hawthorn
would yet have stepped on its delicate tiptoes
out from the hedge and down the wintry grass
when dawn broke on the 27th February 1916,
not that its icy spikes and stiff gesticulations
would have appeared to Private James Crozier
as the last evidence of Picardie and the world,
the hawthorn and beauty impossible to consider
would only have come to pass in the aftermath,
when parent trees on the skyline took a chance
and ushered or let creep forward one of their own
to stall and dither and dishevel out in the open,
to fall and die here in due course still unregarded.