MANY DIED IN HER EMBRACE

ORIGINALLY POSTED Blog #23 | 25.4.2022 | REPOSTED 25.4.2024

Ron McArthur i You were one of those men whose spirit is untameable Living with a vigour and tenacity Outside the margins of convention Knowing death so intimately Life becomes a vast storehouse of joy Death had fallen in love with you And through the subsequent war years followed you everywhere Lavishing love on everyone she embraced Wedding only those who acknowledged The delicate disposition of her radiance Many spurned her Stumbling between grenade and machine gun fire Blood and jungle mud oozing out of every laboured breath Holding onto the thin red line of life At such times she was patient Understanding their reluctance She did not fret or paw the air or stamp her feet She waited on the edge of their dreams Offering the languid roll of her body Knowing in her heart what lay beyond the battleground ii You were not the marrying type You had no time for death or dying Or eternal bridegrooms of the battlefield Death had marked you but death had no hold over you Death loved you but you did not love death From Singapore to New Guinea You witnessed unspeakable horrors Suffered insufferable wounds You fought without malice Without rancour In all those years you could not remember a single occasion When death was absent In your sleep in your dreams In your waking walking Fighting crawling Death breathed inside your lungs It was all you could do to expel that aroma Knowing no sooner had you done so You would again inhale her fragrance iii In the fourth year of the war You floated down river slumped over a log Your legs dangling useless in the currents Your face a kaleidoscope of shrapnel Huge divots of flesh ripped out of your body When you were fished from the water by New Guinea natives Who cradled you onto a litter Carrying you for weeks up and down paths known only to them You did not love death Even though death had never loved you more fiercely Or with such passion You did not recede into delirium Or succumb to the nightmare of that journey To a cluster of huts on the edge of The Kokoda Trail When you were strong enough to be carried To a battalion of freshly stubbled soldiers Your moist green eyes asked for no favours Your soul wrapped like a tourniquet Around what was left of your body Diffused all sensations of pain You craved nicotine and bananas And seemed entirely composed of a shimmering blue light Permeating those who treated you Causing a sensation of heat to suffuse their lungs Shriving their dreams upon the year you took to recover From that first scorching kiss of death iv As you lay dying You thought of all the other times You had been in hospitals Your life a series of graphs and charts Measuring the rise and fall of body temperature The state of your heart The creeping invasion of muscular dystrophy Collapsing muscle tissues nerve endings It had begun in your left foot and spread ever upwards You defied the creeping paralysis As leg irons gave way to walking frames To that first grey backed wheel-chair You took up painting And recording bush ballads To the country and western twang Of Cowboy Bobby Flower's pedal steel guitar You thought of what Bobbie's father Herbie would say Now that your own breath came in short spasmodic bursts Now that the oxygen mask was forever clamped To your yellow-grey lips You pointed to Herbie in his eternal Anzac bath of oil Cocooned in a tideless womb Skin stripped from mustard gas Erupting with violet dreams Enduring the unendurable You tell me how Herbie still grins up at the world and winks those lidless eyes of liquid blue There to remind us of who we are beneath our skin v You thought of the others who had been wheeled in During your decade of resurrections Eroded by the malady of The Burmese Railway Changi or Tobruk The curtain of blood from countless theatres of war Descending upon their now ageing bodies Despite the intervening years The marriages The children The variegated hue of their living In intensive care you recount we all smell the same perfume We all inhale that same aroma of our youth As a watchful bride re-appears More beautiful than ever Many died in her embrace Many spurned her Stumbling between bedpan and heart-machine Shit and blood oozing out of each laboured breath Holding onto the thin red line of life At such times she did not abandon her vigil Understanding our reluctance She sang her bridal song vi Fifteen days after your sixty fifth birthday You had a prophetic dream You told your wife you had seen a brilliant blue pearl of light Inside the pearl sat a god sheathed head to toe In the same shimmering blue Who called for you to cross the river Cross the river of dancing light You told your eldest daughter To eat well and beware of the man who promised everything You told your youngest daughter To eat moderately and beware of the man who promised nothing You told your youngest son To bury you with his gold watch and riding boots on No matter what You told me If I had wondered why Grandpa Joe in his final years Was covered with fine red dust He was corroding from the inside And the dust Well the dust was nothing but the sweat mark of death You told the nursing sister Who had attended you twice weekly for fifteen years To recite the bush poetry you had composed for her Whenever she felt the inexorable ring of solitude Tighten round her heart You told the doctors You would be discharging your self first thing in the morning You told The Reverend Brian Beazley his god was dead You told your eldest brother Tom There was a boxing ring in heaven Where all the world champions were still fighting to the bell You told your youngest brother Kevin To walk between the river and the moon Because that was the only way his sorrow could be cleansed You told Irene whose husband Doug rode shotgun with him On the Gippsland pay wagon every second thursday You had donated two soft-drink bottles to the church In recognition of the part they had played In the saving of your soul You told The War Veterans' Association To auction your seventy two paintings of lopsided racehorses To the highest bidder You told your favourite niece Poppy would always love her You told the nurses You had run out of tobacco again Would one of them duck down to the shop And buy a tin of Champion Red Ruby and a packet of Tally Ho You told death Since there were no secrets between you To get on with the business at hand You hadn't waited this long for nothing And you didn't want to say goodbye to everyone A second time around © Many Died In Her Embrace |Terry McArthur | Blue Pearl Music