‘Looking at Myself in the Mirror in a Bathroom’ or ‘On War’

By Jack Verschoyle

“Sneak home and pray you’ll never know // the hell where youth and laughter go” – Siegfried Sassoon

I

War

War

War

That word – I have heard it on Radio 4*

in the lowest tones of the newsreaders.

So short, those lines, they can’t know war

When shrapnel hits a major organ, like an eye

Shooting a person. Anywhere. As long as they die

Disclose the syllables that we learnt so easily

in History and Dulce et Decorum Est**. Maybe

they sound better off tongues that don’t know war

The shelling of a maternity ward. Babies –

never born already dead inside dead mothers

– to live forever in eulogies and white roses

II

A homeless woman – I saw her on Hastings pier***.

For what debt do we undress her humiliation?

As if she were not weightless. The wheelchair,

that bumbling contraption, not her mobility anymore.

She travels in reverse. One leg full

The other cut short below the knee.

As if we cannot see the kind of sullied

flesh ageing under the bandages of free citizens

Hear these words from every waving hand.

Do I – do you – still need that whetstone?

Not better at all not better no no

* BBC Radio 4. A British radio channel, popular for news programmes.

** Dulce et Decorum Est. A popular war poem by Wilfred Owen.

*** Hastings. British seaside town and site of a famous medieval battle.

Jack Verschoyle studies Logic and Philosophy of Science at LMU in Munich. He is from Oxford in the UK. He speaks English, some French and even less German.