Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, PRISONERS' RETURN, by JAMES MONAHAN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

PRISONERS' RETURN, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: To-night I saw the wounded come ashore
Last Line: And humbly I shall listen to you then.
Subject(s): Patriotism; Prisoners Of War; Soldiers; War


TO-NIGHT I saw the wounded come ashore. ...
In Liverpool? No, man, the local flicks,
and, sure, saw more
than any at the quay.
The most they'd get was a peep, with shoves and kicks
from other hollering patriots; for me
a ringside seat, red plush, price half a crown —
but, there, never mind me. I was in the last.
I saw some good ones go. I saw some drown
later in peace's smooth, oblivious tide.
And maybe I muddle your future with my past.
Maybe I'm sour and grey. ...
Sure, this, to-night, this got my dull eyes stinging —
those docks like Whitehall, Coronation day,
all jumbled with handkerchiefs, but full of singing
and words without meaning that meant welcome home,
and every tug was hooting welcome home,
and through it all that ship, those curious faces
of shattered, smiling boys.
A camera,
we say, is heartless — and this one lent no graces
to a peasant grin or an uncouth, graceless hand,
or some it startled as from a reverie
in the pit where agonies are.
Heartless — but there was one marvel it did not hide;
the voluntary eyes towards their land
like dreamers to an unequivocal star.

On shore, a general and a microphone.
They listened from the ship. They lined her side.
He read his speech. "The motherland", he read,
"will care for you."
Then there they came, the limbless and the blind,
the helped and the helpful, and the crutches clumsily new.
Ay, there they came, the undemonstrative few,
the stretcher cases with bandaged, rigid head
(or Dunkirk relics or left by a Libyan car-track
and left for dying or dead).
Then bland reporters came
with "who's from old Scotland?" and "well, lad, let's have your name"
and "you were in France —just where?" They answered" Arras"
or "Cambrai" or "Saint Omer".
Not much to follow—
more waving — an infant kissed — a train receding
to a song of their own and (how these things are changeless)
the song was triumphant German, anglicised,
just as we used to do. And that was the end. ...
But not quite the end for me. ... Through the last notes, fading,
I heard gaunt voices singing in the Strand
and I saw a dishonoured uniform, that cloth
of the glazed, ex-Service blue, their medals too
and the flag of the cap-in-hand.
And there, beyond,
was a pavement-piano in Trafalgar Square
with "Arras" chalked up and "Cambrai", each with the date
when those dots on a foreign map grew suddenly great
with our wooden crosses, and when I was there.

So you call this retrogressive? old? not fair
to plans, unsentimentally profound?
Well, you may be right; that audience to-night
assuredly said so; for their money talked.
(Oh — after the film a Red Cross box went round
to a jingling profusion of uncounted coins
and each coin seemed a shining resolution
to do the thing well this time.)
But I was thinking:
ten years from now were the better time to see
this fragment from the desolate heaps of war.
Ah! then it would be a probe — how deeply sinking
through how much obliterating moss, before
it struck the embedded stone, that brave, first stone
on which a templed peace was planned to be ...?

So at the last I am frank and will not own
I am blinded by bitterness. Come ten years later —
my friend, come then and say: this bitterness
was blind. And say your plans were greater
than all the powers of forgetfulness.
Come ten years later. Say you have found redress
for the wreck of the world and for wrecks of wounded men;
and humbly I shall listen to you then.





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