Two Rehabs

I.

Heureux, qui comme Ulysse

"Glücklich ist, wer vergißt."

Lehar

Happy that man who, like one of the crew

Ulysses left to Circe, trots on content

Not to remember. The evil that men do

Or are made to do would be torment

If mind held to memory. Small men are sent

Out gun in hand, bomb in bomb-bay, bound by rule,

Under iron order. The murder that was meant

Wasn't theirs to mean, who were hands and tool

Or so they say now, who really don't seem cruel

Or up to cruelty, just shrunk into age

That boils us all down, just toothless and gray,

Who once flooded cities from the sky with fuel

And struck a match, calmly, unimpeded by rage,

Who now nod, whose dreams give nothing away.

II.

If

i.m. John Kipling

d. 1915, Loos

If you had kept your head while all about you

Lost theirs to the shrapnel that wounded you

And smashed your specs, whose eyes just wouldn't do

To guide you back safely from the mud's dire stew;

If you had managed to wait, not spooked by the waiting,

For help for your mouth-wound, as it drew its flies

And drove you, mad through mud, senseless and hating

Yourself for your weakness; if you hadn't cried

And your sergeant hadn't seen you crying,

And so couldn't help for his fear of your shame;

If Kitchener hadn't called; if jingo lying

Hadn't swept through your age group like a flame;

If the Irish Guards had adhered to the rules

Of officer recruitment that spelled out how

Officers need eyesight; if the tools

Of the soldier had been tought you, who now

Dies alone in the mud, impaled on the code

Of the public schoolboy's Brigade of Guards

Machismo that buried you under its load

As sure as cannonfire; if it weren't so hard

To admit to yourself that you don't belong

To this band of brothers, to this landed club

Of feudal remnants, who ruled so long

Without the likes of you, who belongs in a pub

And not in this horror of khaki and mud,

Cursing your father, who, for livelihood,

Flogged books to sell Empire, barked the White Man's blood

With all of its burdens; if you'd understood

How he sweated novels to earn you your place,

Writing fictions that needn't compel belief

In their codes of honor that finally spell death,

Then you'd have stayed a man, no cause for grief,

Whom mud now relieves of manhood and its breath.

Curbside Review, Mar., 2000. Posted with permission.