Foreign correspondent

The uplands deadened him the more:
where people neatly laid in rows
called louder than in other wars,
by simple geometry; he closed

his ears but year on year the song
joined whispers from elsewhere, to drown
the voice insisting we prolong
our lives. He hears no music now.

Daybreak unrolls – without a sound
the empty landscape is unmasked,
the wind has dropped; and far from sea,

the gulls fly, quiet, above the town.
How wide, the space between what passed
and what he told of tragedy.

Published in Poetry Salzburg Review No. 32, and anthologised in The Road to Clevedon Pier