Sentry Duty by Steve Rudd

Halt! who goes there?

Maybe it’s just the darkness coming up the garden

Between and through the trees

Like Birnam wood, en route to Dunsinane.

I’ll take first watch, I thought,

And here I am again, the lone sentry,

Just me and my little bayonet,

Holding back the dark

By staring into it, defiantly.

These nights, this time of year,

A feeble glimmer around

About four-thirty heralds dawn;

I must not sleep on guard, on duty,

But once the light washes greyly up the sky

Behind the branches

I can sleep then, relieved at last.

Until then, I issue peremptory challenges,

And hope to deter; doors all bolted, locked,

But still the dark seeps in, and  

My enemies, my responsibilities

Sit heavy on my head as a steel helmet

Scarred by life’s shrapnel.

This dark trench I find myself confined in

Through a waste of mud that used to sustain life

Leads all the way to the ocean,

And escape means only barbs that tear

Or tears that barb, desertion, or disgrace.

Stand to, up on the firestep! Here flies

Yet more shit your way!

Hush, here comes a whizzbang!

And it’s heading straight for you -

Fix bayonets, five rounds rapid,

Then pull through.  

Somehow, pull through.

My Dad would have understood all this

In his sojourn under the summer orchard trees

Listening for the Luftwaffe’s engines

Rerr-rerring their way across the Channel

Bearing destruction, bearing fire, and

Shrapnel that hummed like hot hornets;

My Grandad, looking through his periscope

Into no-man’s land, would have known

My coiled and tangled wire,

My weariness of body, and of heart.

And, these days, I feel more and more like them

Now I, too, am become sepia and faded,

Slightly out of focus, and tattered at the edges;

Like them, I never volunteered for this;

Oh no, despite my frequent objections of conscience,

And the fact that I am scared shitless,

I too was conscripted, enlisted, just like them,

by the grim recruiting sergeant, Death