Elegy for Thelma Challenor, aged 10.

Elegy for Thelma Challenor, aged 10.

               

‘Father-like He tends and cares us,

                Well our feeble frame He knows.

                In His hands He gently bears us,

                Rescues us from all our foes.’

                                                (School Hymn)

After the raid, through smoke from burning cities,

Gawking at craters, I crept stunned to school,

Picking up shrapnel from disfigured roads,

Hefting its weight upon a grubby hand.

All night, dark clouds had drizzled jagged steel,

Maniacal lightning blazed from murderous skies,

Thunder had shattered streets of little houses,

Baths, carpets, wardrobes drunkenly entwined.

Our milkman’s horse bristled with crystal daggers,

Skeleton buses mimicked burnt-out tanks.

When solemn schoolmates told me she was dead,

I shrugged and walked away. Boys do not cry.

The desk we’d shared was empty as her satchel;

Her ‘Things to Do’ forgot to mention ‘Dying’.

Her phantom sat beside me all that day,

Thick lashes lowered over haunting eyes,

Turning the pages of her ghostly books;

At times she touched me, copying my maths,

I shivered when brown hair caressed my arm,

Flinched when she brushed my cheek with icy lips.

At four o’clock, watching a convoy anchor,

Steam rising, hissing, from the shattered decks

As hoses washed torn flesh into the scuppers,

I hear her weep, ‘I’m lost! Please take me home!’

At dusk, before crazed sirens howled their song,

I went  to call on her, to say goodbye –

Doll’s houses battered by a giant’s hammer,

And broken puppets dragged from rubble heaps;

Some insane ogre in his seven-league boots,

Bellowing for blood, had trampled the street flat.

A doll impaled upon a splintered branch,

Her long plaits tangled in her gaping wound,

She’d looked just so, when I told scary tales,

Biting her thumb, tense with anticipation,

Pulling a strand of hair across her eyes.

I wrenched her loose, fled from the gathering night,

Entombed her in my toy-box, under treasures –

A dud grenade, shrapnel, machine-gun belts,

A bayonet, a live incendiary bomb –

Wrapped her in a shroud of parachute silk,

Muttering a clumsy prayer to a heedless God.

Crouched in a frosty cave, too scared to sleep,

Hearing the drone of killer-bees above

Circling the burning flowers of the towns,

I penned a poem by guttering candlelight,

While slow wax dripped on paper like hot tears,

And the air heaved shuddering sighs with every blast.

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM