Souviens-Toi

Oradour-sur-Glane is cut off from the rest
of France. Iron gates divert the N route
from Limoges that once took through a tram,
the telegraph, the casual commerce of a nation.

Nothing lives in its dry ruins now
but weeds. The grass is cut around the car
left by the doctor on the day he died and burned.
Rust has sculptured it, and before that fire.

On that June day in 1944,
4 days beyond the beginning of the end
in Normandy [not much before the RAF
were bombing Caen] the SS came to Oradour.

Their rank precision arranged the town much as
we see it now – the women in the church burned
with the kids, the men in barns, shot low
to bring them down, then sacrificed in flames.

The dead are known and numbered, their sufferings untold
have come to the same end – a common graveyard
and a mausoleum where their last possessions
and their ashes can be sampled under glass.

And still we tourists come. French, Dutch and
English number plates park outside the gates
[the Germans on their way to Spain no longer
stop in France] to share our European heritage.

It lives again this town – as if the polished
insulators and the wires still sang with local
orders, news of cousins in the rest of Limousin.
A people walk its streets. In shorts and tee shirts,

we pause to look at images of flame red bricks
behind the crumbled plaster; pots, pans and
Singers; a bicycle marooned upon a wall.
Wordless, I let my camera take it all.

Before us came the men in black, anonymous,
known only as “the nazis” on each plaque.
We take their steps, and leave no names behind,
like them. Their map too was Michelin, they had

their places they must do. Each fresh reprisal
marked a cross upon the way. Their own
journey to a death in France. About the suffering
they caused – I can neither take it in, nor write.

Words light on what those tourists left behind,
and what the French have kept alive – a sense,
the senselessness of mind, of what they did.
It happened here. It happens everywhere the same –

they’re lynching, burning, shooting, raping –
pinning on their grubby uniforms our human shame.
It does not matter in whose name. A chasm
opens up and all our hopes fall in.

Another dry summer
The garden hose lies out
all day. Each night I water
flowers whose anonymity, colour,
character and short, short life I respect.

Another dry summer in Africa
Sad children die of cholera,
a name we have exported with the
automatic rifle and the tank.
Their remote lives, unwatered, wither.
Ammunition blooms on the ground at their feet.

Ellingham
28.7.93

Neat, double curves of iron
Enclose a sense of opportunity.
Waiting is anticipation of elsewhere going and
Coming. The air booms with
Adenoidal announcements.
Sleek carriages grumble over
Tracks that disappear into half moons of light.
Laid when steam was
Everything – an age of

Certainty, when top-hated
Engineers were only
Next to God. Their roaring
Trains kept people in their places,
Ran classes in and to their separate stations.
And now electric locomotives haul
Less formal times behind them. They

Sidle modestly between the platforms.
The barriers have gone where uncles waited
And wartime lovers kissed each other one last
Time. The clock has seen out arrivals and departures,
In with the old,
Out with the
New.

“THESE WOODLANDS ARE A CONSERVATION AREA. NO DOGS UNLESS ON LEAD. KEEP TO MARKED FOOTPATH ONLY”
SIGN ON THE SANDSTONE TRAIL, RAWHEAD, CHESHIRE

for Pete Morgan

One step beyond the stile we trespass
down a margin of the world. A bluff escarpment,
thinly wooded, edges us to sanctuary
between machine cropped fields. Unplanned things,
like thoughts, may be allowed to flourish here
within the confines of electric fences.
Here is something other than we have
in terraced yards or lawn edged gardens:
here grow the undeveloped grasses,
or gather, in the hollows, cars that sculpt
themselves to rust. All that our living
has no need for made into a reservation.
Roads thread the grey horizons.
Beyond the trees and casual walkers
a careless energy consumes the world.

Tattenhall, March 1990