Battleship Indefatigable

He met his end, a mere lad
in the grey north sea, though it was near midsummer
- balmy days of green and gold
those longest days, his final ones
when the jackals of the oceans split that great ship, a thousand men and more
in a matter of minutes;
at two-fifteen precisely
she upended and plummeted to the Jutland banks
breaking a generations hearts in one fell swoop.

That is the legend, history’s account
until I happened upon an old black and white photograph
taken from a sister ship, the precise instant her stern lurched to the sky
then plunged to the deeps in a cauldron of smoke and flame;
in that exact moment I see the tumbling men, the terror
their iron-clad world a sudden cacophony
of rending steel, screams and rushing waters
our boy and everyone else’s beloveds
swallowed into the maw of nameless death
so swift and irrevocable
yet frozen out of time
imprinting the fabric of the ethers with undying horror
so we, descendants, a hundred years on
can pin-point and enter the same crucible
by virtue of that fortuitous onlooker,
- a time machine
by which we visit that abyss
wherein our own DNA lineage was so brutally curtailed
and only the ensuing familial rage and grief
could bridge that gap and reconnect, make real the desolation
as well as celebrate those little things that do not die:
the lad who, schoolboy wrote, on baby sisters appearance in the world
“I think she should be called “Kerrenhappuch”.
Was his brief sojourn less significant than our long haul
battling with, not gunfire and unutterable fear
but the daily grind to preserve or retrieve our shabby honour
worn down and out with the years of concupiscence, collusion
and the unremitting attrition of plenty, comfort, shades of grey.