The War Photographers
By Frank Ormsby
Working with one eye closed or heads buried
under their drapes, they focus to preserve
the drowned shell-hole, the salient's rubble of dead,
the bleached bones of sepoys torn from the earth.
Their stills haunt us: a stretcher piled with skulls
at Cold Harbour, graves in a barren wood
that in one hour's carnage lost its name
to history and the world's memory of death.
The worst has happened, they confirm the worst:
but show us too the makeshift hospital,
the sad errand of the hospital van
among the ruins. Also enough of sky
to suggest the infinity of angles,
that behind sandbags, under the hostile towers
someone is finding time for a wry note
on bowel movements, an entry that affirms
the loved salience of what is always there:
flower of Auschwitz, bird of the Western Front.
Copyright Credit:
Frank Ormsby, "The War Photographers" from Goat’s Milk. Copyright © 2015 by Frank Ormsby. Reprinted by permission of Wake Forest University Press.
Frank Ormsby, "The War Photographers" from Goat’s Milk. Copyright © 2015 by Frank Ormsby. Reprinted by permission of Wake Forest University Press.
Source: Goat's Milk (Wake Forest University Press, 2015)