Ann Pilling

You doze, I listen.
In the spaces between songs an owl calls
from a Breton wood.
But these are English words, a poet writes
of golden kingcups
fringed with silver light; the trees edge nearer.

Where we shop for bread
the village square is filled with grey people,
stone sons, stone mothers,
squared off with a little fence. Here the war dead
are called enfants.
On Omaha Beach the waves turned red.

They still find shrapnel
buried in the sand but I can't take in
the scale of it all.
Is this music making me cry, or France,
or, from the sentinel trees, that lone owl's call?

(from Home Field)