Four War Poems Poem by Sheena Blackhall

1.Friday, July 1940
A couple started enjoying a small aperitif
Pre-lunch sherry in Aberdeen’s Canal Terrace
The glasses shook as the blast blew up their garden
Their piano entered their sitting room, uninvited

The Heinkel bomber above them
Flew like a bat out of hell, Spitfires in hot pursuit
As it jettisoned a part of its deadly cargo.

Hall Russell’s shipyard workers on their break
Unwrapped their lunch, their rowies, or baps of spam
Or stood to down a pint in the Neptune Bar
Choosing a horse to back, a joke to tell
Killed in droves as the bomber thundered on
Ploughing into the Ice Rink near the river.

The astonished dead were shipped by horse and cart
Along the Denburn up to Woolmanhill
A strange cortege of shoppers, children, fellow workers
Witnessed their passing
Death in July come swiftly, out of a clear sky.


2.Sea Side WW2
Fittie beachfront lined with ack-ack guns
Rolls of barbed wire menacing the waves
German sea mines washed ashore on the tide

A wrecked flour mill, grain mixed with iron nuts
A severed finger lying in the rubble.

On Union Street, limbless & blind
The veteran heroes of the last Great War
Sat in the cold and wet
Selling their matches, laces,
Pleading for coppers to fill their daily plate.


3.April,1943
The death planes came from Denmark, south west Norway
Searchlights strafed the city’s darkening skies
The drone of German planes, stutter of guns
These were the childrens’ wartime lullabies

An ARP girl warden stood and screamed
‘The planes are coming! Hear the sirens’ noise!
Miss Spicer lay beneath her primary school
Her blackboard, desks, tossed round like playground toys

Pregnant women hugged their precious bellies
Bombed churchyards brought the hidden into sight
A ghastly dance of death, strange resurrection
When skeletons rose up to join the night


4.Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria
Hair like a frightened badger
Sad eyed moustached Franz
Visited Sarajevo with his wife

The Black Hand terror group had planned his killing
The first two bottled out, armed to the teeth

The third one lobbed a bomb, which bounced and missed
Wounding twenty unintended victims

The bomber, Cabrinovic, swallowed cyanide
Jumped in the river Miljacka to die
The poison made him vomit, and the river
Was just four inches deep and almost dry

Reaching the Town Hall, Franz called for his speech
Wet with the blood of others, yet he read it.
The tour continued onwards, as was planned.

Gavrilo Princip stepped out from the crowd
A teenage murderer, a young fanatic
Too young too hang, too young to think of mercy
And cooly fired his pistol into the car

Hit in the jugular, Franz sat bolt upright
His plumed hat tumbled off, green feathers falling
His stricken wife, slumped with a belly of lead
‘It is nothing, it is nothing, it is nothing, ’ he said

And then, the death rattle,
The sound that plunged a whole world into war
Albert from Brighton, George and Fred from Troon
Millions who thought black hands were miners’ trademarks
Millions who’d never heard of Sarajevo