tara christie
in literary history). The subsequent, more expanded version of ‘No Man’s Land’,
dedicated‘in memory of Isaac Rosenberg’, juxtaposes Jessica’s oblivion (part I) with
that of Rosenberg (part II):
I
Who will give skin and bones to my Jewish granny?
She has come down to me in the copperplate writing
Of three certificates, a dog-eared daguerreotype
And the one story my grandfather told about her.
He tossed a brick through a rowdy neighbour’s window
As she lay dying, and Jessica, her twenty years
And mislaid whereabouts gave way to a second wife,
A terrible century, a circle of christian names.
II
I tilt her head towards you, Isaac Rosenberg,
But can you pick out that echo of splintering glass
From under the bombardment, and in No Man’s Land
What is there to talk about but difficult poems?
Because your body was not recovered either
I try to read the constellations of brass buttons,
Identity discs that catch the light a little.
A shell-shocked carrier pigeon flaps behind the lines.^59Commemorating those who have been abandoned in a ‘terrible’ anti-semitic
‘century’, Longley stands alongside Hill in ‘watching the horizon of the setting sun
and sifting the remnants left by the careless and bloody parade of history’.
Longley’s role as the scrappy collector of discarded war relics is made clear in
the poem’s manuscripts. In cancelled stanzas of the poem (then entitled, ‘A Broken
Wing: For Isaac Rosenberg’), Longley imagines the ‘shellshocked carrier pigeon’
with a broken wing, unable to fly home from the Front with lists of dead and
missing soldiers:
a carrier pigeon on its way back
From the front line, shellshocked, zigzagging.
Has artillery put out its eyes? Its legs
Wear lists of casualties, bad news in splints.
I spread my fingers on that broken wing
And count the dead, and count the missing.^60Obliged to ‘count the dead, and count the missing’, Longley not only takes on the
burden of the role of poet-commemorator of unacknowledged victims, but also
assumes the role assigned to his ‘sad retarded uncle’, Lionel, whose job at the Front
(^59) Longley, ‘No Man’s Land’, inCollected Poems, 157; quoted by permission of Michael Longley.
(^60) Longley, ‘A Broken Wing: For Isaac Rosenberg’, Michael Longley archive.