Nicholas McGaughey
A town has slept in a hillside
for a century. Men who left
their livings for the Kaiser:
butchers, teachers, a clerk of works;
some two and a half hundred
stooped in feldgrau, where blue-firs
have canopied the craters
and spoil that tombed them.
There have been looters here
bent on old coins and trench-art,
on watches that looped on
a week after the air expired.
Deep in the dug-outs, pictures
of kinder they never saw marry
watch over tables set with benches,
tin steins and chargers for a meal.
A strop hangs under the mirror
in the latrine, where a bone razor
brush-set and a nub of soap
anticipate a morning.
Nicholas McGaughey has new work in The London Magazine, Stand, The Friday Poem and The Verve Anthology “Protest”.
andotherpoems.com 