In the second extract from Jackie Kay’s poem sequence celebrating the friendship of Wilfred Owen and his mentor Siegfried Sassoon at Craiglockhart Hospital, Edinburgh, in the First World War, she imagines Owen musing on Sassoon. Her poem is followed by one of Owen’s most devastating indictments of the war. Owen did not survive the war; Sassoon did.
SASSOON
The night I met him the moon
Sailed in the sky, a big eye,
Looking down on the Hydro, at me and Sassoon
Young men who refused to tell the old lie -
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
~
The night I met him, my heart flew, I won’t lie.
For an hour after breakfast I’m a poet.
By night I’m a sick man ruined by dreams.
The thing that keeps me going is him, Sassoon,
The way he makes me look up at the moon.
~
I felt myself spinning around, but you fixed me,
And I know, dear man, I’ll swing out soon
I’ll be that dark star when you blaze,
I’ll be that word in the sky; for all our days,
Sassoon, it’ll be me when you look up at the moon.
ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH
What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?
- Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning, save the choirs, -
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
~
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
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