An unknown poet died here,
booted feet knee deep
in the wine-red sea,
the shoulders, uniformed
with silver pips, raised
by one arm that gripped
a bleeding chest.
His face breathed sand.

Young Churchill, crop
pressed into his left armpit,
strode through the scattered
dead, seeing only heroes
whose unripe blood washed
the stone cenotaphs of
an empire that ruled distant
continents and sepia masses
from a tiny island.

Britannia was, he was convinced,
mandated by Heaven to heal
the world of chaos and the twin
chancres of democracy and
colonial freedom. Lords were lords
and destined to control the fortunes
of men not born in that happy Isle.

His great ancestor, Marlborough,
no sad bone anywhere, bared
the lion’s claws on the fields
of Blenheim and Ramillies,
and savaged the armies
of the Sun King for his Queen.
He never flinched when a cannon
ball between his legs sheared
off the plume-helmeted head
of his equerry. Churchills
don’t cringe when Death
rears its fleshless visage.

Not so the mothers of Melbourne
and Christchurch, the wives
of Connaught and Mallaig, walking
slowly, heads cast down,
puzzled sons and daughters in tow,
to the muted skirl of pipes
and the rustle of muffled drums
behind coffins full of sand,
since those they loved and missed
sleep under tailored grass
in Azmak and Lala Baba near
where they died. The empire
that took their sacrifice
the way kestrels take mice
for sustenance, did not survive.

Churchill survived the fiasco
of Gallipoli to the next war
when stuttering George Six
called on him to lead the
almost moribund empire against
a failed Austrian landscapist
with dreams of surpassing
Macedonian Alexander. Winston,
no longer young, proved himself
once again, a true acolyte of Mars.

This time Coventry was sacrificed.
Göring’s Dornier and Heinkel fleets
were allowed to decimate the
Midland city, incinerating
thousands, crippling thousands
more to save the secret of Enigma.
Touring the rubble afterwards,
Winston coined, between cigars,
one of his deathless phrases:
“In war, losses are unavoidable.”
He might have added what the father
of a charred girl told the BBC:
“A timely evacuation would have
saved lives, something more,
much more, valuable than strategy.”