November 1956

He was a good sort of feller.
The soft burr of the Fens was on his tongue,
and in the smoke and stale odors of the billet
his rosy cheeks shone
around a quiet smile and pale blue eyes.
He moved away from foul language
and brute mouths, without judgment
of their struts and boasts and wide wet lips.
He read, darned his socks,
wrote letters home or snoozed.

Before our time there,
he had worked his father's fields,
hoed the long rows of kale
through rods of rain
or helped around the yard
but brought here now
to bend over engines, plugs and pistons
and the warm reek of oily steel.

Sometimes he'd cock his head
and follow with his spanner
the flight of swallows
over waves of wheat.

But we found each other out,
he and I,
one gray afternoon in November
when a Canberra fell from the sky.

A circle of silent boys,
stunned by enormity,
enclosed the huge pit in the mire.
We moved, slow as grazing deer, over the shambles,
flicked muck over torn bits of people.

He moved beyond me,
lost in echoes of the yard
pealing with the protests of a roped sow;
poked with a broken spar a thigh bled pale as pork.
It rocked and sucked in the mud, slid to his persuasions.

He turned his mask of quiet smile and rosy cheeks
and blaze of pale blue eyes upon me
as I stumbled down the bleak perspectives of his mind;
a land of no horizons.