A poem by S.C. Gordon of Shanghai.
The Regiment
– on sonnets
That morning they’d bent to don their black-soled boots
After hours through which none of them had slept.
Bending to tie them, not one thought to refuse
The fate that dogged them even as they crept
Into the trenches; cheerful swipes and looks
To mask the snapping, banging dread
Of their mortality written, poised to hook,
Thinking of nothing but the sweating dread.
Their death pose, now preserved in picture form,
Shows ten brown, soiled skeletons dug out from the pit
Where the part-time sacristan had laid them down
Hands clasped, the line of them unsplit
By years, by decades that have gone:
The regiment of bone-men, boots still on.
Author Biogrpahy
S.C. Gordon was born in the north of England in 1981. She studied poetry at Oxford University. Her poetry collection “Peckham Blue” was published in 2006 by Penned in the Margins press, and charts the discovery of her biological family in south London. Her favorite poets are T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Matthew Sweeney, Sylvia Plath, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Paul Verlaine. In 2008, Gordon moved to Shanghai, where she works as a freelance writer.
S, I have read this countless times. It’s perfect – thank you for letting us print it.