Poem of the week: ​April Fools’ Day by Elaine Feinstein

A biographical sketch of a misfit soul carried into the carnage of the first world war rises to an elegy for a ‘life half lived’

April Fools’ Day
in memory of Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)

Does anybody know what it was all for?
Not Private Rosenberg, short as John Keats.
A nudge from Ezra Pound took him to war,
to sleep on boards, in France, with rotting feet,
writing his poetry by candle ends.
His fellow soldiers always found him odd.
Outsiders do not easily make friends
if they are awkward – with a foreign God.

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