Scotland’s Makar, Jackie Kay, has written a poem sequence to mark the meeting in 1917 of the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon at Edinburgh’s Craiglockhart Hospital. There, Sassoon encouraged and mentored Owen, who went on to write the most searing of poetic testaments to the horror and futility of the First World War. In her poem below, Jackie Kay imagines the hospital itself reflecting on its patients.
CRAIGLOCKART (War Hospital for Neurasthenic Officers)
At night, my walls close in on men
Who have closed in aroon their selves
Young men – auld souls – whose een
Replay the shocking things they’ve seen and been.
~
Men, who’d prefer an all-nighter,
A chain of cigarettes, a book,
Than to see the look of those up closer
Wandering forever lost in the in-between
~
At night, when the moon has slipped
Over the Salisbury Crags,
Men within my cracked walls
Meet ghouls o’ themselves coming back.
~
I feel the weight of them,
Whose hearts are in lock-down,
Whose deaths are in their mouths,
Who stammer through to dawn.
~
What would you do if you were me
Listening night after night to broken men?
Would you put them under lock and key?
Or would you unlock their hearts again.
~
I would give them my art, my poetry
I’d give them my land and the grief of my sea.
I’d give them the spill of my Pentland Hills
I’d give them my will and my word
~
So I would, so I will - here’s my hand,
here’s my heart - to put an end to war
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