He does not lie in foreign fields.
No unmarked grave or simple cross,
in distant lands, conceals his bones.
Life is this soldier’s albatross.
Drink’s a temptation and he yields:
booze brings oblivion.
The stones
fly up to meet him.
It’s absurd
that he should brave a war yet fall,
unmourned, in some civilian street,
dead to the world,
dead drunk,
awol.
He lies in vomit, vision blurred,
used, decommissioned, obsolete.
Richard Fleming