(for the new war memorial in Kilmarnock)

 

Between the lines of men,

The lines of women come:

In case you think me strange,

Your postscript never came.

The lines you repeat before you fall

Into line, and the ones you say when you fall

Asleep. Dear John, dear, dear, darling –

Lines unsaid, lines unformed.

You were a line crossed out, erased.

Dazed, the girl who waits late, frazzled, fazed.

The living still had to write a line. Messages:

Poached rabbit. Out of your mind!

Then the soup line; and on the bread line –

There again – two eagles flown to the wind.

How you were left behind, left behind,

To feed the mumbling mouths of weans.

Family lines:

Broken. I won’t carry a gun, he said.

I will carry the wounded, he said.

And for years, she did, she took the dead on her back.

I listened to you in my dreams, you said. Knock, Knock.

I’m sending a kiss from Kilmarnock.

Years down the line, there are the lines

You’ll have said to the dead, who, all of a sudden,

Return and keep returning like the blossom to the trees,

Like the wintergreen along the borderlines.

Return now to walk this fine line between the living

And the dead, winter or spring, winter or spring.