The War He'd Come to Fight, by Mathew Wenham

Patient with Malaria (Corporal Arthur Batchelor), by Nora Heysen (Australia) 1945

The War He'd Come to Fight 
for Alfred Thomas Williams
 
This wasn’t the war he’d come to fight.
His bayonet, fatigues and slender
rifle were trained on foreign bodies
the same as his – explode the bone,
gouge the gut’s flesh and man
up proud, for home, if your flesh 
becomes home to blade or bullet.

This wasn’t the war he’d come to fight.
The needle flight and saw-toothed
straw that trepanned him and spat
the parasite whose slow bloom
made a hot-house of his skin,
couldn’t be tracked on a unfurled 
map and felled like game in-season.

They’d warned him on the boat: The invisible
enemy split the sodden air like moon-
light through an almost drawn curtain,
ghostly, needling, lethal. He was,
though, only alive to the knife-edge cries
of dropping shells and burst of battle’s lights,
alive only to the war he’s come to fight.

A mocking chill rose and shook the sweat
that pooled in his sockets and the rationed
soup spewed like lava forced
from a fractious core while the rot
of the monsoon’s soak on the canvas
roof yellowed the sickly brume of twilight – 
this wasn’t the war he’d come to fight.

Mathew Wenham 

Mathew Wenham is currently the Head of Senior English and Literature at a secondary college in Melbourne, Australia. He has previously worked in multiple Australian universities as a teacher of philosophy and psychology. Mathew is a long-time lover of poetry, and is now in the first stages of his path as a poet. His work was been shortlisted for the 2020 Ada Cambridge award and his poems have appeared online at Nine Muses Poetry, Better Than Starbucks and The Society of Classical Poets