In Memoriam

by Alice Winn

What I meant to say is this: You’ll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.

What a waste Sandys’ last days had been, thought Gaunt. Pathetically attempting to overcome a grief that would never have time to heal.

We had reached a point in history where we believed it was possible to make war humane.

I stood on the most God-forsaken patch of earth I hope ever exists and I thought: I wonder how Elly is.

Unrequited love was a difficult thing to live with, but Ellwood managed because Gaunt needed him.

If something dreadful was being done to Gaunt, he wanted it done to him as well.

It was spring of Lower Sixth, and Ellwood was so in love with Gaunt that his thoughts ran wild with anger. Gaunt was woven into everything he read, saw, wrote, did, dreamt. Every poem had been written about him, every song composed for him, and Ellwood could not scrape his mind clean of him no matter how he tried.

In the hypermasculine atmosphere of war, they were not overly concerned with manliness.

Ellwood smiled, and a sudden, dry bleakness spread over Gaunt’s heart as he thought of Hercules, and Hector, and all the heroes in myth who found happiness briefly, only for it not to be the end of the story.

It had been hopeless to love Ellwood because Ellwood did not love him back, and now it was hopeless even though he did.

He did not see colours the way he used to. He knew that the grass must be a vibrant, aching green, but it did not seem so to him.

My dearest, darling Sidney, There was nothing else. Only dead white paper, blank and meaningless. A comma, followed by nothing. Death summed up by grammar.

I hear the breaking bodies scream. Thankful I have hit my mark, I slither through the trenching dark. You bleed to death in all my dreams.

“Ellwood used to say, ‘I know you’re fine, but are you all right?’”

He had become used to the idea that he would die. There wasn’t anything else to think. He only wished he wouldn’t have to see any more of his friends killed before it happened.

“To faint in the light of the sun she loves, / To faint in his light, and to die,” he thought. He felt no pain at all.

Ellwood had to turn away, because it was painful to look at something so lovely without knowing if he would be allowed to keep it.

“Yes, it’s an abomination,” he said, lightly, although he knew it wasn’t. Knew it couldn’t be. It was the cleanest, purest part of him.