Vergissmeinnicht (Forget-me-not)
Captain Keith Douglas (1920-1944)
In Calvados you have your cross
And though we won, you most surely lost.
Your sacrifice, at twenty-four, to modern ‘wit’
Is nothing more than a crying bore.
Who now has read Alamein to Zem Zem
Your story of the war in the western desert?
For though you certainly knew how to kill
You did so with no draperies over your eyes.
Or soul. No deceptions, no disguise.
And when you were chained to an office,,
Hidebound behind the front line,
Somebody laid a coin upon your tongue
And lyric water sprang anew.
You very nearly lost your mind. So in October 1942,
Against orders, you set off to see what you could do.
This venial sin was soon forgotten in the crush of war
And you drove your tank indomitably!
And then on the ninth day of June 1944,
As keen to ‘to do your bit’. as you’d been in 1939,
You lost your life, killed by enemy fire,
Your body buried in a road side grave.
And after the war, your dear remains re-interred at Tilly-sur-Seulles
War Cemetery, south of Bayeux, plot 1, row E, grave number 2
Go there, then see what you can do.
John Marks
Wed 24th Mar 2021 20:30
Thank you Keith. It is so important to remember, especially when we are seduced into taking our freedoms lightly. They were won by blood and sweat and tears.
Here is Keith Douglas' original and brilliant Forget-me-not poem:
Vergissmeinnicht (Forget-me-not)
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