He met me in pyjamas and a dressing gown
but there was nowhere in that bare room to sit down.
I put my flowers on the bed, no vase –
glass or pottery shards can sever arteries.
He liked the pretty hat I’d chosen specially to wear
and stared directly in my face
as if he sought a likeness there
to my dead Edward. Let us talk of him, I said.
In the common room was a piano
and Ivor played – but none of the men
who sat around, eyes bent on the floor,
gave any sign they heard.
He wouldn’t go into the garden – that travesty
of countryside. If only he were let
out to his Gloucestershire for an hour’s happiness …
What if he did end his own life after that?
So next time I brought Edward’s ordnance survey map,
and Ivor trod those lands and villages again,
with finger walking down each track,
better than ever we sane could imagine them,
wandering the hills beside my husband,
though they had never met – and Edward
brought back to life for him
and me.
The poet and composer Ivor Gurney served in the First World War and was committed to a mental hospital in 1922. The poet Edward Thomas, Helen’s husband, was killed in action in the war in 1917. This poem is reprinted from No Man’s Land by Kathryn Southworth (Dempsey and Windle, Guildford, 2020) by kind permission of the publishers and the author.