image - A mother weeps at the loss of her son as she waits for his body at the Yarmuk hospital. At least 11 people were killed in Baghdad, including three men travelling in a minibus reportedly shot dead by US forces.(AFP/Ali Al-Saadi)
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image and poem below the fold
Vergissmeinnicht
by Keith Douglas
Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.
The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.
Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.
We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that's hard and good when he's decayed.
But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.
For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.
A note from the site where I obtained this poem - "Vergissmeinnicht means "forget me not" in German. The phrase 'War Poets' usually calls to mind names such as those of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and their contemporaries from the First World War (the 'Great War', as it was called in its immediate aftermath); although the Second World War did produce its share of important poems, most of them were written at some remove from the trenches...Douglas is the exception: like Owen, he distinguished himself on the front lines (thus achieving a moral stature which enabled him to criticize the carnage around him); like Owen, his poetry has a universality which speaks to readers removed from its immediate context; and like Owen, he was killed in action."