On the eleventh day of the eleventh month, at the eleventh hour. The epilogue poem for Aldilà, In Memoriam.
The photograph (©John Davies) is of The Chattri, a memorial built on the South Downs outside Brighton to honour the Indian soldiers who died in the First World War. There Hindu and Sikh soldiers who died in Brighton’s war hospitals during 1914-1915 were cremated.
In memoriam Which would disintegrate first? The dead spider I found in the bedroom or, rather, brought in from the balcony with the wind like a pallbearer, or the balloon I blew up in the workshop and wrote on its skin: “Where are you now? Where have you gone?” Of course I know. Today I remember those in my family who fought in World Wars, and watching the dipping and raising of flags, hearing the Last Post and the ‘going down of the sun’, I feel a tremor of guilt and revulsion that not one prayer remembered the birds, the dogs and horses, deer and sheep, pigs and cattle, and all the other creatures, blasted to kingdom come by the shock of munitions. Then thinking of my grandfathers and father and father in law, I see them lean over the edge of their world to peer momentarily into mine, over the rim of time, looping past and future, slow and fast, their smiles glimmering, as beside them, in their millions, walk every soldier or sailor or airman or woman who ever lived and died. Oh, these glorious, I had not thought death had undone so many but knew millions of millions must be counted daily before the sum can be tallied. And all the while, each in their turn, in their worlds, lean against the rim and look their successors in the eye (if they wish, it’s not obligatory), and beside each as many again of animals, and beside each animal as many again of more. And so the sequence runs, the encircling rim is constant, where there is a murmuring of healing and redemption, and crows and forgiveness, but just a murmur, nothing more and hard to hear and decipher at the best of times. “Where are you now? Where have you gone?” The same question asked by the Wooden Man enmeshed in the blackness of his tree like Kali dancing in a blackened bronze as triangular as the splinted spider. In his words, difference is a gospel of kindness, kinship: “Who are you? Where are you from?” 'I had not thought death had undone so many' from The Waste Land Section 1 The Burial of the Dead by T. S. Eliot
