The Millions

[This poem took its inspiration from a sonnet by Charles Hamilton Sorley, When you See Millions… The sonnet was in a collection of writing about World War One.] Of war I read The poems, the pain, the countless dead And when you see the millions… The millions thrown together in common grave Of what were battle lines And now are places paved With bones and blood and interwoven human flesh Their lives they gave, it makes me wonder why All men they flocked together, came to fight and die Though I wonder even more at how we live Our dreams, our aims, the things we choose to give And when you see the millions… The millions thrown together in common streets Not soldiers now, as citizens they meet But in each other sense the foe or spy Protect the private castles, avert the eyes From foreign gaze or so as not to see The other kind of me, one old or poor or not all there Or just a neighbour’s sad or jealous stare Of their own accord our hearts and hands Lay borders, demarcate the lands And build the trenches, place the guns The lines of city fences, few the crossing points Fewer still the truces called, the white flag raised For emergencies perhaps, for holidays When we stop being islands, become the sea Unstitch the private space and melt into the ‘we’ But otherwise, the lonely shadows flitting by For one or two a tear we could cry Extend an outstretched hand and warming word Not snatched away unheard in city rush That sometimes brings to mind the people crush Like in the soldiers’ tales, piles of corpses in the way Just trampled underfoot in war’s indifferent haste That dulls the finer feelings, steals the taste Of fellow human beings and fate we share These streets and skies and yellowed, dirtied air Amidst the millions lose our individual face Become the masses, fashion our new place As atolls, reefs, and endless rocks No shore we leave for building docks No room in concrete towers grown tall The weaving all machine-done now And we, we raise the walls.