Wire Cutters

“The wire cutters were my private contribution to the Great Offensive.”

—Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

Siegfried, today I fenced in the gooseberries using wire cutters That no longer work like an agricultural tool in my hand, When I remember your wire-cutting party on June 30, 1916, in France. After the colonel’s periscope revealed artillery’s failure to blow the wire, You crept out with your trusty wire cutters To sever the tangled concertina for the Manchesters to cross No Man’s Land. You and Kendle, undetected by the sniper’s scope, Snipped away before zero hour.

During the summer of 1964 Stewart and I stretched barbed wire With wire cutters, staples, and hammers for Colonel Reynolds’s camp In Grundy County. We sweated off Tubby’s beer on a sunny day While stringing wire far in the backcountry, far from college books. Five years later we met again along a wire stretched by hate, Two lieutenants caught in a no-man’s land between armies in Korea Where we yearned for the high pasture back in Tennessee Where fences kept our horses safe.

In July 2005, at the edge of the Devonshires’ trench, I traced the path toward Mametz Woods Where you squeezed those wire cutters along that stretch Of German wire before the Battle of the Somme. Now, sighting across my field, I stretch wire with a come-along, Hammer staples, grip the handle for this last cut, And follow the silent corps of memory, Sweeping through barbed wire and history.