A Casualty List

 

In Flanders Fields 

Gilbert Claes

A Casualty List

by Mary Carolyn Davies



There was always waiting in our mother’s eyes, 
Anxiety and wonder and surmise, 
Through the long days, and in the longer, slow, 
Still afternoons, that seemed to never go, 
And in the evening, when she used to sit 
And listen to our casual talk, and knit. 
And when the day was dark and rainy, and 
Not fit to be abroad in, she would stand
Beside the window, and peer out and shiver, 
As small sleek raindrops joined to make a river
That rushed, tempestuous, down the window pane,
And say, “I wonder what they do in rain?
Is it wet there in the trenches, do you think?”
And she would wonder if he had his ink 
And razor blades and toothpaste that she sent;
And if he read much in his Testament, 
Or clean forgot, some mornings, as boys will. 
But always the one wonder in her eyes 
Was, “Is he living, living, living, still 
Alive and gay? Or lying dead somewhere
Out on the ground, and will they find him there?” 
She closed her lids each night upon that look 
Of waiting, as a hand might close a book
But never change the words that were within.
And when the morning noises would begin 
A new day, and a young sun touched the skies,
Again she woke with waiting in her eyes. 

 

But that is over now. She does not read 
The lists of casualties, since that one came 
A week or two ago. There is no need. 
She’s making sweaters now for other men
And knitting just as carefully as then. 
There is no change, except that as she plies 
Her needles, swift and rhythmic as before, 
There is no waiting in our mother’s eyes, 
Anxiety or wonder any more. 

“A Casualty List” was published in Mary Carolyn Davies’s poetry collection The Rums in Our Street: A Book of War Poems (Macmillan, 1918), the same year World War I ended. She dedicated this volume to her three brothers.