Today is Remembrance Day, so it seems entirely appropriate that I post a poem by John Jarmain.

Tel-el-Eisa
Tel-el-Eisa is Jesus’ hill,
Or so they say:
There the bitter guns were never still,
Throwing up yellow plumes of sand by day
And piercing the night across.
There the desert telephone’s long lonely line expires,
Ends with a tangle of looping wires
And one last leaning cross.

Jarmain, a World War II poet, was killed by a mortar round in Normandy in 1944. His collection, Poems, was published posthumously in 1945. I now have a copy – bought from a seller on abebooks.com. The collection’s back cover blurb describes Jarmain as having “an original vision and a lyric voice”, and I’d very much agree with that. There are some wonderful poems in the book and they deserve to be much better known.