The soldier at Owen's elbow could not read:
crouching in his trench he ached for sleep,
but words like bombs kept bursting.
Divining cause and circumstance
from hieroglyphs of dust splashed out in rain
and runes of light exploding through his eyelids,
he mouthed a soundless rhetoric.
Teeth to teeth, tongue to palate
and jaw in time with heart convulsing,
he prayed with no listener in mind,
unconscious even of a speaker.
The stones against his cheek marked out a rude cuneiform
and the clay his fingers clung to was his Braille:
his blind escape was immediate and wild.
Owen could have read to him
passages from Blake and Hardy, Keats and Arnold,
evoking an idyllic home and the tragic irony that held him;
in fact, he did before he, too,
stepped blindly to his own escape, immediate and wild.
But this illiterate soldier died dumb and blind,
his single script a mass of cursive maggots;
and only Owen, having honed his skill
through five thousand years of practice,
could tell us why, or whom to blame.
He could, but didn't.
Who now, a scribe well-read and practiced,
will tell us and all behind us
why and whom to blame,
so that our own escape, immediate and wild,
will not be blind?
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