Poems on war: Paul Muldoon is inspired by Rupert Brooke

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/26/paul-muldoon-rupert-brooke-war-poem

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I'm a huge fan of Rupert Brooke, one of the first poets I read. In fact, the only poet whose work was in my childhood home. I thought it might be interesting to rejig Brooke's idea of the corner of a foreign field and make it "forever Ireland" rather than "England". I also recently visited the battlefields of Gallipoli, not far from where Brooke died, as well as Morocco. I traced what must have been a distant relative who died in the second world war somewhere in north Africa. All of these ideas came together in the poem "Dromedaries and Dung Beetles".

"Dromedaries and Dung Beetles" by Paul Muldoon

An eye-level fleck of straw in the mud wall is almost as good as gold . . . I've ventured into this piss-poor urinal partly to escape the wail of thirty milch camels with their colts

as they're readied for our trek across the dunes, partly because I've guzzled three glasses of the diuretic gunpowder tea the Tuareg hold in such esteem. Their mostly business casual

attire accented by a flamboyant blue or red nylon grab-rope round their lower jaws, dromedaries point to a 9 to 5 life of knees bent in the service of fetching carboys

and carpetbags from A to B across the scarps. Think Boyne coracles bucking from wave to wave. Think scarab beetles rolling their scrips of dung to a gabfest. These dromedary-gargoyles

are at once menacing and meek as, railing against their drivers' kicks and clicks, they fix their beautiful-ugly mugs on their own Meccas. The desert sky was so clear last night the galaxies

could be seen to pulse … The dromedaries were having a right old chinwag, each musing on its bolus. Every so often one would dispense some pills that turned out to be generic

sheep or goat. The dung beetles set great store not by the bitter cud nor the often implausible Histories of Herodotus but the stars they use to guide

themselves over the same sand dunes as these thirty milch camels and their colts. They, too, make a continuous line through Algeria and Tunisia. Dung beetles have been known to positively gambol

on the outskirts of Zagora, a boom town where water finds it hard not to gush over the date-palms. Despite the clouds of pumice above Marrakesh even I might find my way to Kesh,

in the ancient Barony of Lurg, thanks to Cassiopeia and her self-regard. Think of how there lurks in almost all of us a weakness for the allegorical. Think of a Moroccan swallow's last gasp

near the wattle-and-daub oppidum where one of my kinsmen clips the manes of a groaning chariot-team . . . Think of Private Henry Muldoon putting his stamp on the mud of Gallipoli

on August 8 1915. It appears he worked as a miner at Higham Colliery before serving in the Lancasters and the 8th Welsh Pioneers. His somewhat pronounced ears confirm his place in the family gallery.

'It's only a blink,' my father used to say . . . 'Only a blink.' I myself seem to have developed the gumption to stride manfully out of a Neo-Napoleonic latrine and play my part in the march on Casablanca during the North African campaign.

"The Soldier" by Rupert Brooke

If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

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