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1. Pissoles

‘Yer eyes are like pissoles in snow.’
Sergeant Birkett fixes us
with a seagull stare.

Six weeks, and he’ll crack the same joke
to a new intake. This too is a stage,
and the old jokes are best.

Last night we drank three pintfuls
of powerful Lincolnshire cider.
It cost a day's pay.

The bugle sings reveillé‚ at 0 six hundred hours —
a new kind of clock for
a new kind of life.

Then a cold-water shave in the ablutions,
with no light, though now there’s
light enough for the officer to check our shave.

We ourselves are hot khaki pissoles
in the cold snow
of defending our country.

2. Students

My fellow former-students are wallowing
in this charade: this is the life:
playing soldiers.

In the evening they settle down happily
to dura-glit their buttons and their mess tins
and blanco their webbing.

I sit in the bar drinking cider. I imagine
cracking a person on the jaw with my rifle-butt
and my bayonet going into his belly.

I want out — to visit the cathedral —
out of this farcical detention camp
for the defenders of freedom.

Supposing I were a conscientious objector.
Would I work on a farm, or sit
happily in prison?

Since I volunteered to be a hired assassin
I must endure the immediate nemesis
of boredom.
3. Lincoln Cathedral

An invisible energy
hurtles through space
and is incarnate in air.

Flying through the oldest glass
in England, it’s a
great rose eye

under whose largeness my
small eye watches me
wandering in darkness.

I'm a light myself under
my bushel of khaki, only
occasionally aware.

Even my air is paid for
by the work of breathing,
but light is free.

Tinctured and enriched
with these stains
I'm a wealthy St Francis.

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