Ralph Vaughan Williams premieres his third symphony
a requiem recalling the war dead, London, 1922
sentry poplars, stock-still in the dark, slip
leaf by leaf into the rising sun, mist
as it thins no icier than the slick
overcast puddles shattered by kicked, skipped
stones, rain-strafed shell-holes falling in while long
lines of men approach, so trench-chilled they may
admit some won’t return, the sky willed grey
the bugler’s charge announced in echoes rung
through tattered, reluctant copses, straitened
ruts cut across trepanned farms to the front
the crops blooded, sown with mud and cordite
stretcher bearers weighed down on the silent
way back, their feel for felled limbs nothing blunts
calloused fingers responsive, scarred past fright
John Barton’s twelfth book of poems, Lost Family: A Memoir, was nominated for the 2021 Derek Walcott Prize. His thirteenth, Compulsory Figures, is forthcoming in 2025. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, and raised in Calgary, he lives in Victoria, BC, where he was the city’s poet laureate from 2019 to 2022.
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