Three poems by Stephen Milne

Bouzincourt

• The woods are full of the sound of birds
• and the doors of every village shuttered to the sun.
• In lingering fields of wheat, white crosses burn:
• the names of all our dead are silent words.

• Trees once cracked and broken bloom again.
• Poppies are accents of accidental blood.
• Each tomb has an epitaph: unknown, beloved,
• regretted. Marks of valour are their own sign.

• On every martyred lane a rumour grows.
• Death — whose brothers, uncles, husbands, friends
• have left their agony amongst the green —
• has sown itself a resurrection from the soil.

• Not once each year, but every day they sing,
• the nightingales of Bouzincourt, Ancre and La Boiselle.

The Somme, France 2012

Stealing Gooseberries

• Over the red wall in the dust the low drills
• drew us to their strung wires, electric with light.
• The first wire spooked us like bird shadows,
• lifted as easily as crumbling roots.

• Then, without thought, that sweet-sour bitterness
• of the green forbidden fruit, its fuzzy
• roundness marble-hard, a taste of breaking waves
• emerald-white under creaking, ancient trees.

• Our tongues tied, tangled with summer seed,
• we ate among the thousand silver leaves
• that fluttered in the solar darkness like flares.

• Aldebaran brought with it frost, our first taste
• of winter’s hoary ice, flooding from our senses
• the age-old drama of guilt and innocence.

Poacher

• Wheat crackles under the beams of his arc-lights,
• their great eyes blind to the presence of strangers.
• From the edge of an old car, he hunts by stealth,
• reaches through darkness for each small death,
• gropes under starlight for the taut limbs of the hare.
• My arrival disturbs him, sends him back
• into the blindness of fear and betrayal,
• of wings whirring in the panic of flight.
• He knows, with the practice of years, how blood
• gives off its own unconscious sound and scent.
• Alone with the morning, he counts his catch,
• the dripping fields twitching into life.
• He admits, if you ask him, that tradition is wrong.
• Dawn’s carcass hangs in his shed,
• its sudden trophies half-lit and bled.

Stephen Milne lives and works in Lincolnshire in the United Kingdom. He has been previously published in a number of small magazines and journals and is married with six children. He is planning to release his first volume of poems, entitled Moorings, later this year.