Jackson Mathews
356
TO WILFRED OWEN
A week after they killed you by the canal
Not war stopped but pity of war stock still.
There was a boy, eleven, on a Georgia farm
Mocking the mocking-bird, racing the worm
To school the morning a bullet put the stop
To what you were doing, giving your men a slap
And a 'well done, my boy, very well done.'
That morning your strange meeting was with no one:
You turned from the straitened water, face away
And thunder in your lungs, and fell like day.
That boy did not feel the earth quake with your thud,
Not because you fell as you did in mud
But ... the pity of war one pity of war
Is that pity carries
·
not very far.
Yet poems you left for pity above the ground
When you went under in mud and thunder drowned,
Found him in Oregon, Owen, carried to Oregon
Through years that made him grown and you more gone.
But pity, the pity, your only begotten son
Is an old man now, amnesic, undone,
Begging door to door to know his name,
The laughing-stock of children, and no home.
They're at it again, Owen. The village idiot
Who didn't know the war was over was right.
