Many of us will be tempted to do a spot of gardening today in the Spring sunshine. Our poet Fiona Clark harks back to the trenches of the First World War. Day 510 of the daily new poems.
Gardening in the trenches
France, the trenches, 1915.
Along the line, Gillespie trailed, in thought,
his mind with brothers, face-down in the mud,
hands clutching at the banks. Destruction raged.
But mud is dung – when morning came again,
the sunlight shone into a disused trench,
where a few straggling, purple violets clung.
So, from war-torn allotments, he took plants,
old roses, golden marigolds and herbs,
and made a garden in the churned-up ground.
Wrote home and begged for seeds: all seeds of life.
They came, potatoes, cucumbers, and greens,
pansies, cornflowers, hollyhocks and chives.
He set the men to dig, sow seeds in broken shells,
give birth to carrots, cabbages and leeks,
soil in their fingernails, the smell of home.
They even found that celery would grow,
inside the mildewed darkness of a trench,
pale salty columns reaching for the light.
Gillespie’s corpse was blown apart at Loos,
his blood, and brains, and bowels, fell on the earth,
and fed the hidden roots of all that grew.
And after Armistice, through No Man’s Land,
where nitrogen had seeped out from the bombs,
wild blooms exploded, red and gold, and blue.
Fiona Clark
Alexander Douglas Gillespie, 2nd Lieutenant, Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, 1889-1915. While in the trenches he envisioned a ‘Via Sacra’ , a long distance walking trail which today is a reality, the Western Front Way. Gillespie lost his life in the Battle of Loos, killed by gas while leading a charge. He was 26. He has no known grave.