Strange meeting (after Wilfred Owen)

Poem by Roger Iredale

And suddenly we came upon fellow men, sipping tea
in a basket of darkness underneath a hollowed gentle
moon. Their voices overcame the stillness
of the silvered glade, the whereabouts of mystery

where they lounged, receiving only orders to the front
or rear, wondering at the strangeness of the milieu,
the shattered trees, broken farmhouse, mounting
death of comrades and uneasy brooding peace.

It would have been a night of memory, a lull
of strangeness in all the bent hypocrisy
of daily death, meaningless to all but them
whose job it was. Until we lit the dark.

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