HANS KONING
The Mourning of Captain Johnston
Johnston.
To
the memory of David, Capt., 5th Yorks Regt.,
who fell in action at Contalmaison, Battle of the Somme, July
12,1916.
-Notice in the personals column of
The London
Times
of July
12,1995
Splintered trees dripping on the mud,
and children crying, Tommee, gum, Tommee,
and the smell of long dead horses
in the last village he marched through,
the lopsided grins on the soldiers' faces,
those pale skins of undernourished childhood:
that was the last day of David Johnston.
But through these six-point letters, four one-column lines,
once every July for seventy-eight years now,
his name faced the light of an English morning,
evoked a darkened image,
a whisper-thin memory of an unbelievable day.
This too will come to a stop,
and it had no meaning, sorrow only.
DIANA DER-HOVANESSIAN
Cookie Sayings
"How you look depends on where you go
not: where you go depends on how you look."
A Chinese fortune cookie told me so.
