Canakkale

All but a century

gone. By the thousand,

pinned down

on slopes, on beachheads

shot to death, and rawboned,

ours and theirs, blown

to pieces.

Two-faced anthropos,

late again, stirs to condemn

the bad plan, but snatches a caress:

Now, unmarked,

that fish

once on this opposite shore

for who knows who to remember,

scales glistening in a shell

of late sunlight, a savage

to the last gasp,

the writhing amorous, beheaded,

gutted, eaten.