i.m. Captain Keith Douglas January 1920 - June 1944: soldier, poet

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. Or heart. No deceptions no disguise.

And when you were chained to an office,
Hidebound behind the front line,
Somebody laid a golden coin upon your tongue
And lyric water sprang anew in your poetry.

Passivity very nearly lost you your mind, killing time. So in 1942,
Against army 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 dear body buried in a road side grave.

After the war, your remains were re-interred at Tilly-sur-Seulles
War Cemetery, south of Bayeux, plot 1, row E, grave number 2
Go there see, then see what you can do.

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