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  • Ronald Colman, and: Second Lieutenant Tooke
  • Michael Longley (bio)

Ronald Colman

My dad served with Ronald Colman in the Great WarAnd laughed at his daydream of Hollywood stardom.London-Scottish kilts looked frumpish after battle,Blood, mud, and shit bespattering handsome knees.My dad lost all his teeth before he was twentyAnd envied Ronald Colman’s spectacular smile.He watched him trimming his moustache in cold teaAt a cracked mirror, a thin black line his trademark.Wounded at Messines—shrapnel in his ankle—He tried in his films to cover up his limp—BeauGeste, Lost Horizon—my dad would go to see them all.Did he share a last Woodbine with Ronald ColmanStanding on the fire step, about to go their separateWays, over the top, into no man’s land, and fame?

Second Lieutenant Tooke

I should have commemorated before nowSecond Lieutenant Tooke who helped my dadRescue Nurse Moussett of the French Red CrossAt Paris Plage in June nineteen-seventeen.

He was swept away by currents and drowned.My lifesaving dad just made it to the shore.Not once did he mention the unlucky Tooke.This was a breather before Passchendaele. [End Page 64]

Michael Longley

Michael Longley is one of Northern Ireland’s foremost contemporary poets. His book Gorse Fires won the Whitbread Poetry Prize and The Weather In Japan won the Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry, the Hawthornden Prize, and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His recent publications include Snow Water and Collected Poems. In 2001, he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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