War Hero

By Glyn Maxwell b. 1962 Glyn Maxwell

Where recollections end,

step finally from the land

and into the white before like the masked birdman,

a boy is bound to appear:

growing, hurrying here

over the hot dry grass towards his grandad.

He, who fought on the Somme,

wanted to see the same

storm damage, down the road on a meadow,

as did this boy of five.

The sky all blue above.

Was there a storm? morning enquiring. Never.

I caught him up on the road.

‘Look at the oak,’ he said,

and sure enough it was peeled to the root by lightning

we’d both seen. Its scar

was fierce white. Nowhere

could we see the bark tracked clean off with a fork.

He wouldn’t touch the sore.

‘Reckon it’s hot there.’

Anything else he reckoned or said about it

he carried onto his flight

climbing, level in sunlight,

to Lancashire summers beyond the hideous river.

Source: The Boys at Twilight: Poems 1990-1995 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000)

Biography

Born in England to Welsh parents, Glyn Maxwell was educated at Oxford University and Boston University, where he studied both poetry and theater with Derek Walcott. This simultaneous training in two disciplines has enabled him to create innovative work across genres. Maxwell has written numerous verse plays as well as long narrative poems. The Sugar Mile (2005), a verse narrative set in a Manhattan bar a few days before . . .

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