NaPM April 14 2016

[bedeep]

I'm moved by the contrast you depict between the tourists looking for their surface pleasure, and the night returning in the final stanza, the men who came to die from so far away.... That's deftly done; there's a real impact here. Thank you.

Gallipolli

We boarded the van for a tour of the battlefields.
A Kiwi with us, a woman from Parkes,
a girl who looked like Brooke Shields
and a black American, somewhat exotic to the Turks.
Our tour guide from Izmir was happy they'd won
though he pretended not to notice
In victory are all things forgiven.

This was the ancient Dardanelles
Byron swam, by self hate driven,
cutting clean through the mythical swells
in the memory of heroes older than Troy.

Anzac cove disappointed the Parkes woman.
'I thought it was bigger, like the time
we went to Rome, and found the forum
smaller than a strip mall on the A39.'
The Kiwi was happy, the sun being shaded right
for his Leica, and on a teacher's salary, he said
he'd better take his snaps in this perfect light,
this moment from a distant world,
tomorrow the NZD may well be dead.

The guide, who hadn't seen the distant world
spoke of the strange fates of men who'd come to die
from as far as New Zealand. Think of it, he mused,
from the other end of the world,
and his voice trailed away

into the sea's white noise as rain
clouds gathered, and Samos looked like a fortress in the mist
its hills like towers burned out through nights 
that have come again and again.