Libretto Poem by Richard Whiting

You don’t need to know
how I ended up in the mire.
That’s another poem.
What I can tell you
is that I was rescued
by a flotilla
of musical notation
that drifted by.

The long arms of a treble-clef
lifted me clear of the water,
crochet and quaver joined forces
to carry me ashore,
before the whole ensemble
rose in a gentle glissando

and a black ‘V’
formed against cold, grey cloud,
moved far inland,
led me to a room
high in the college tower
where I sat at a desk
idly staring at the roof-top cartography

when a couple of poets
from the Great War started
reading to me.
Now, I’d seen the cenotaphs
of a hundred Suffolk villages,
watched November wreaths
bleed white in the winter sun,
but these guys knew their stuff;
I could hear their bleeding brothers
calling from between the lines;
taste death rolling around on my tongue.

I would have gone straight home,
but the old roads
had lost their appeal
and there were people,
who I would later recognise as friends,
showing me another way,
where I could pick words from trees,
lay them gently across a page
and write a new libretto
to the soundtrack
of the boy in the mire.