At Wilfred Owen’s Grave

A week before the Armistice, you died.

They did not keep your heart like Livingstone’s,

then plant your bones near Shakespeare’s. So you lie

between two privates, sacrificed like Christ

to politics, your poetry unknown

except for that brief flurry’s: thirteen months

with Gaukroger beside you in the trench,

dismembered, as you babbled, as the stench

of gangrene filled your nostrils, till you clenched

your broken heart together and the fist

began to pulse with life, so close to death.

Or was it at Craiglockhart, in the care

of “ergotherapists” that you sensed life

is only in the work, and made despair

a thing that Yeats despised, but also breath,

a mouthful’s merest air, inspired less

than wrested from you, and which we confess

we only vaguely breathe: the troubled air

that even Sassoon failed to share, because

a man in pieces is not healed by gauze,

and breath’s transparent, unless we believe

the words are true despite their lack of weight

and float to us like chlorine -- scalding eyes,

and lungs, and hearts. Your words revealed the fate

of boys who retched up life here, gagged on lies.