Sandcastles on Mars

[A veteran visits war cemeteries by the
beaches and riverbanks of Normandy]

Among the sandcastles they play,
defend the flags, hold tournaments,
save damsels from the wicked fiend,
lead armies across trench, ravine,
and claim victory and – exhausted –
picnic on sandwiches and candyfloss.
The tide steals in like thieves and,
at a stroke, takes all away.

On a sandy riverbank in Picardy
he fits the bits and pieces of his mates
limb by limb into a yawning sack
and digs and fills a hole and puts a cross
and scrawls a name and number,
date of death and rest in peace.
Eighty years pass, he holds
a stranger’s hand and stands beside
one white among a thousand crosses
in a field that echoes bones
and reads his dead mate’s name
and iterates, “I say! I say! I say!”

In the debris on the planet Mars
a time-traveller kicks, as children will,
a sandy rock. She will be first
to birth a human baby umbilical
in the red and unpolluted dust
several million miles from home.
Eighty years pass. Her child
reads her history on a gilded screen
and holds a disembodied hand
and may then say, “I say! I say! I say!”