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  • Darkness with no End
  • Stephen Bluestone (bio)

After Channel Firing

At dawn, still wide awake, we lay Remembering the voice of God, More like the guns than we could say, More angry, too, as if the Word

That split the waters with one breath, And made with loving-kindness light And every creature of the earth, The shining day, the blessed night,

Regretted it. And so we wept, Our empty sockets filled with tears, Though no one heard, the living slept The weary sleep of warriors.

Until a round—and then they woke To a whistling out of deepest Hell, Grabbing for masks as the deadly smoke Quickly scattered, clinging, from the shell.

One whiff of the gas was all it took, And the living clawed the air and cried, “O Christ, come quickly, save your work, Preserve us now, for whom You died.”

“Have mercy on us, Lord, your own,” They wailed. “We are the least of yours, Who suffocate, go blind, and drown, Gagging and burning, with blisters and sores.” [End Page 46]

All this in airless coffins we heard, Though lidded tight for centuries: The living judged before the dead, But harrowed first, and then at peace.

And so we gave up wondering, And settled down again to spend Eternity unquestioning, In bloodless darkness with no end . . .

And still the slaughtered rose in tides, From Ablaincourt to Miraumont, Where God for every one now chides, In trenches on the Western front.

The Ghosts of the Somme

On the eve of the Second Gulf War

at exactly 7:30 a.m. on July 1 with a ripping fire from bunkers and nests the slaughter came down like a towering wave

the half hour struck from Courcellette to Flers like a chime in a cabinet engraved with images of beetles skulls and crosses

at Ancre and Thiepval Ridge on the salients of Gommecourt and Mametz Wood men dropped like weights or dancing first tumbled in all directions [End Page 47]

the slain were everywhere and the trenched fields shook with mines and in the flares at dusk each soldier saw a double of himself . . .

and tonight too as we talk flat on their bellies silent as worms the anxious dead still helmeted draw near us in the dark

and under the pearly moon with ashen faces corked they listen at the crack of dawnthe dead be sure of it will die again. [End Page 48]

Stephen Bluestone

Stephen Bluestone’s poems in this issue are taken from a book-length manuscript in progress entitled “The Painted Clock.” His awards include the Thomas Merton Prize and the Greensboro Prize.

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