| J.R.R.
Tolkien
(writer of the "The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy")
in the
Twentieth Century:
at the Somme, 1916 Scrape
your fingers along your greasy scalp,
pick out scabs, bits of lice with your
nails.
You are a signal officer in the Lancashire Fusiliers
and your wife
of 4 months, Edith,
sings and dances across the Channel
from the blood
and death and mud
which is the Somme. A
shell-broken man bleeds on a stretcher,
gestures, gargles: you understand
and take his locket from around his neck.
The weight of words press full on
you,
even when they are not words, just wet sounds. It's
difficult to sleep; when you do,
you dream of a mariner
blown so far into
the endless ocean
he's accepted death. But he does not die:
he's pulled
off the deck of his ship,
taught, by beautiful natives of an alien isle,
language. A week after
your battalion gets shredded on the wire
you interrogate a captured German
officer,
map out enemy locations.
He accepts your offered water,
corrects
your pronunciation,
suggests red ink for the man-traps. In
twenty years you will argue Beowulf
is not a pagan fragment or a poor allegory
but is a poem of lights opposing outer-darkness
where a man struggles against
the beast
again and again and again
and is overwhelmed. | 
