Death of an autistic war child

I was born on the sleeves of an immigrant
father whispered God into my ear
My tears were folded in muslin
Stars stayed in drone-moan sky

I was a difficult birth early as the Thrush
Freckled as the bullet ridden minarets
Always crying at the call to prayer
God, it seemed wanted me back.

I died on the palms of my ululating mother
My father wants to fold me in muslin
Whisper some kind of God into me
Summoning a mythical paradise.

Antony Owen is writer from Coventry who is sick and tired of conflict. Post-Atomic Glossaries: New and Selected Poems is published by Broken Sleep Books.

Sacrifice

after Genesis 22.2:  Then God said, “Take your son, your only son,
whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah.
Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you”.

Let fathers bind their sons
to altars, so the wind
might winnow the chaff.

Let a million feet
trample out
a threshing floor.

Let the harvest moon
light the hunter’s path.
Let the guns begin again.

Let the earth feed
on bone-meal and rain,
let fire do its work.

*

The ground marks digging men
with chalk, the Somme moves gentle
and slow.  Primroses litter No-Man’s Land,

broken trees sprout green buds
and men clamber into the uproar
of a summer morning.

Some drown in fire, some lie close
with the earth and feel it quake, of those
some blacken into filth, some crawl,

try out sound and scavenge words.
In the quiet that follows
starlings cloak the shifted sky.

*

I am wire tangled into
the approximate shape of a man
in a fireside chair.  At dawn

rain broke heavy along the valley,
sent sheep bleating to the trees.
If I dream gas as wood-smoke

it isn’t so harsh on the throat.
By chapel time, sun spilt
through clouds blinding the road.

I am waiting for the mud
on my boots to dry.
When still I hear the choir.

Martin Figura left school at 15 and joined the Army from a care background. He has published numerous collections. This poem formed part of sequence commissioned and published on-line as Maps by The Soldiers’ Charity in 2020. The commission included interviewing veterans with PTSD. Some of those poems appear in his most recent collection The Remaining Men (Cinnamon Press).