Girls croon outside the booth, ‘Enlist today!’
They tap-dance, hand out pamphlets. A tinny speaker
plays Tiny’s speech: ‘The spirit of Anzac, I know
won’t call in vain.’ I’m proud of my volunteer,
but eight pounds a week exchanged for soldier’s pay –
that’s hard. It’s almost five years since we met
and married for love. Will our little girl and boy
remember their father’s face? Will I forget?
So far away these man-eating giant wars
that rob us – are they really New Zealand’s concern?
On last home-leave he’s been digging an air-raid shelter
and planting beans while I put up black-out curtains.
We cry when we kiss. Too late to say it, I know,
So long since I slept so long! The slatted light
of Cairo wakes me at last. A smell like urine
mixed with exhaust comes up from the noisy street.
Under the fan, a woman’s legs lock mine,
her fingers thread my hair, her Ionian eyes
open, dark as olives, surprised and smiling.
After the chaos of Crete – that sky full of paras,
our loss of the airfield, days in the rocks hiding
waiting for a boat – I think I must have forgotten
how well the body, well-treated, will treat the spirit.
Twice satisfied, I want to want her again.
I’m unsure of her name – she’s a mistress, not a wife.
I love her in the way you might love the planet –
impersonally. She might be ‘Beauty’ – or ‘Life’!
A quarter for Jean, a dime for little Barry,
gum-sticks for both: he was sitting looking unwanted
in Cornwall Park. We talked about the Maoris,
the olive trees that Logan Campbell planted,
the monument up on the hill. It began like that.
He was just another Marine on leave from the war
with Japan. I told him my husband had been in combat
in Greece and Crete, and now North Africa.
‘It’s a mad world,’ he said. I must have known
what would follow – the phone-calls, flowers, scent,
kissing in taxis. If I could love two men
the same, it wouldn’t have mattered. Today he sails,
and that’s the end. He gave me farewell presents.
I gave him nothing. Already I’d given it all.
The silence wakes me early. We’re winning our war.
Under desert sky, blue-pink and pale as a shell,
tents and tanks seem welded to their shadows.
It’s more like Genesis than the Gates of Hell.
Not a man in sight. I award myself a shower
in a box rigged for the General. I’m soaked and shiny
when he comes in a towel. This is a nightmare –
one ballocky soldier face to face with Tiny
in his own shower. The big man waits till I’m done,
nods and says nothing. They say when Monty complained
we didn’t salute he replied we were fighting men.
‘Just give them a wave,’ he said, ‘and they’ll return it.’
As I dry myself I watch the tracks of water
down those hard white ridges of his battle scars.
I look at my Dad’s picture. I think I remember
the day he left. His battle-dress tunic was rough
like sandpaper when he hugged me. In it somewhere
he had my goodbye present. It was a knife
with three blades and a corkscrew I used to throw
at tree-trunks so it stuck. One day I missed
and couldn’t find it. I didn’t let anyone know.
It seemed bad luck. If the knife he gave me was lost
it might mean he was dead. My sister says
how good it will be when our soldier-dad comes home,
but how does she know? Mum says, ‘We’re counting the days.’
He’s in Italy now. He wrote on a card from Rome
‘We’ll all be glad to see an end to this war.’
I can’t tell Mum, but I like things as they are.
‘If I should die think only this of me,
that there’s some corner of a foreign field
that is for ever …’ what? Do I say Kiwi?
The way we like to tell it, and to be told,
New Zealand’s best, most prosperous, beautiful;
but something has turned my telescope about –
I see it small and mean. ‘This Europe’s rubble,
destroyed, finito’ – even the Italians say it.
It isn’t true. There’s something here that soothes me.
I’ve buried mates, and killed a man so near
I could smell his breath. I don’t want scenery
and a prosperous suburb. On the Via Flaminia
the whores are tough, unsentimental, funny.
They live without hope. That means they live without fear.