The Soldier

By Matthew Parish

Friday 28 August 2026

He went away in ordinary clothes,

A coat too thin, a battered pair of shoes,

And said the things a man departing knows

Are best made jokes, because there’s more to lose.

We drank. The station clock performed its part.

Somebody coughed. The platform smelled of rain.

He had that English awkwardness of heart

That makes affection sound a mild complaint.

Then Ukraine took him — not, as maps might show,

With coloured arrows crawling through the east,

But slowly, through the things one comes to know:

The sudden silence after noise has ceased,

The basement where the frightened children slept,

The road where something once had been a man,

The telephone whose unanswered ringing kept

Insisting on the failure of a plan.

He wrote sometimes. The messages were brief.

All well. Still here. Don’t worry. Then a joke.

As though good manners could extinguish grief,

Or words disperse the smell of burning smoke.

And then one day he came back through the door.

No bandage showed. He carried his own case.

He stood exactly as he had before.

Except that someone else had got his face.

It was not age. Age has a patient hand,

And lays its little taxes year by year.

This was as though some brutal foreign land

Had stamped its exit visa somewhere near

The eyes. They watched the corners of the room

Before they settled on the person there.

A slammed door seemed to widen out the gloom.

A passing siren tightened all the air.

He smiled, of course. We all know how that’s done:

The little upward movement, quick and kind.

But smiles belong to those who think they’ve won

Permission to leave yesterday behind.

He had not. Somewhere, still, a mortar fell.

Somewhere a drone hung buzzing in the night.

Somewhere there was a cellar’s private hell,

A road, a field, a sudden orange light.

And all of it had followed him back home,

Invisible as winter in the bone.

A man may cross a frontier, freely roam,

And find the frontier will not leave him alone.

We talked of harmless things — the price of beer,

The weather, friends, the places we had been.

Yet every trivial sentence made it clear

How wide the gulf between the heard and seen.

I wanted, stupidly, the man who went:

The laugh that rose before the joke was through,

The careless hours magnificently spent,

The confidence that ordinary things were true.

But friendship cannot bargain with the past,

Nor ask the dead to loosen what they hold.

We learn that some homecomings never last,

And some young faces suddenly grow old.

So now I sit with him. I do not ask

For tales that make his silences explain.

There are some truths for which speech is a mask,

And some companionship consists in pain.

Outside, the evening gathers on the street.

Cars pass. A neighbour shuts a garden gate.

The world performs its small routines, complete,

As though the world were innocent of fate.

He lifts his glass. For half a second, there,

I see the friend who left that rainy day.

Then something moves behind his eyes somewhere,

And takes him back a thousand miles away.