There was once a basket weaver
with ankles like rods of steel.
His muscles petrified, heart petrified,
his memory snapped shut as the bombs fell.
Whizz, bang, and his mind contracted like a muscle
to a tight bank of pain.
The film jerks, stagnates then jumps.
Black and white footage convulses,
as the boy soldier stiffly flaps in his wicker wheel chair.
He laughs with the same detachment as a trained seal
with hands clapping like fins.
He bends like an ancient tree to bite his thumb.
He is more ancient
than his crooked toothed grin and smooth skin.
Blood, mud, and brutality give him years
that others must earn over decades instead of months.
Private Meek, with his complete retrograde amnesia,
learned to walk again and weaved baskets for the rest of his life
far from the hell that rewrote his history.
He was 22 when he left the battlefield in 1916,
but he walked like a puppet on strings, dangling on the edge,
a precarious ballet of near sanity.
