More songs by the fighting men. Soldiers poets: second series/Ian H. T. Mackenzie

IAN H. T. MACKENZIE

2nd Lieut., Highland Light Infantry

 

Desire

THIS is my desire
Which burns the fuel of my soul.
O terrible white fire!
Leaping to blister the sky.
Beyond my sight;
Ever reaching higher;
My strength and my delight;
Oh out of my control!
This is my desire:—

To hear the song that beauty sings,
To refashion the earth with the joy of things,
To grasp in a corner of my mind
The sunlit clouds, the driving wind.
To let imagination fly
Up the beauty of the sky.
To hold it with me when I go
To sing my song on earth below.

This is the desire
Which burns the fuel of my soul.
O terrible white fire!
Leaping to blister the sky.
Beyond my sight;
Ever reaching higher;
My strength and my delight;
Oh out of my control!
This is my desire.

 

And So Man Lives

AND so man lives
Between those shadowy gates
Where darkness covers up his memory,
And thought with thought forever separates
The disconnected things that he can see.
Those two strange steeps:
One whence he wakes,
And how he cannot tell;
One in which he falls
And knows not how he fell,
Where life with memory breaks.

······

Memory like water
Surging round our ears
Brings its echoes, softer
Than the sound of laughter—
Laughter of some strange forgotten years.

······

Someone gazing in a stream sees reflections hurry by;

Someone underneath a tree searching all its greenery;

Someone looking at a face holds a flying memory.

······

Broken images that pass
Through a twisted looking-glass;
Things we do and things we say
Ever fluttering away.

······

Disconnected things we see
In the brightness of the day:

Just a flower growing there
In the happiness of air.

Tiny little birds that sing
In the melody of spring.

······

What we are and what we see
Are only shreds of memory.
Broken shreds and fragments pass
Through a twisted looking-glass.