On the Execution of a Mural

by Allan Todd, concerning the Battle of Maldon.

Dim figures from the mists walk at my wall,

Emerge and turn and point and tear them free,

From some white back-washed landscape overall,

That you have etched beyond, so patiently.

 

For every stroke discovers some old ground

That Saxon rode, or Viking trod before,

And from my well of words your brush has found

The distant vista of some wilful war.

 

The war we’re waging still, the spirit seems

To chafe at limitations in the plan,

Each striving after what we know of dreams,

Is overcome by flaws in every man.

 

For as you peel each layer from the wall

Disturbing truth as it may lie beneath,

Your brush reveals each want these figures trawl,

Relives the last that loss would see them breathe.

 

Each stroke I see as tearing at their shroud

While they emerge, so wilful in the mind,

I almost hear the clash of armour, loud

Though every staring eye is dead, or blind.

 

As blind as we who, trapped within our time

May not remove ourselves beyond the page

That we forlornly pattern with our kind,

To pen each failing foray of our age.

 

For as each man will struggle to emerge

From white, to take his shape from his surround,

And hope to be embodied at the dirge

His death, a thousand years, will run aground;

 

Then so may we, who taunt the living clay

And heedless of the time we hold in trust,

So struggle from the bonds of our dismay,

Before the mural moulders at our dust.

 

But though we may, dim figures from the mists,

Emerge and turn and point and tear us free,

Once history has sealed us at its lips,

Some brush might etch our canvas differently.

 

David Lewis Paget