AND DID ANYBODY MOURN

Over the hill from Boulogne-sur-Mer, beside a crumbling cliff, there lived a man alone with his dogs in a relic of the War; a sunken concrete courtyard with subterranean sleeping quarters for those who manned the Germans guns along this northern shore.

We walked along the path atop the ragged edge, and those barking dogs unnerved us, as did the sense we got of pervasive lawlessness.

How came this habitation, so irregular, so remote?
What bureaucrat allowed it, ignoring all the rules?
And did he pay to live there, or had he just arrived, a homeless war-time veteran whom no one turned away?

A storm brought down a slice of cliff, and the footpath’s course was changed, and now where it passed that place nothing could be seen but a clump of hostile brambles; an entanglement of thorns.
But the dogs heard us, and we heard them
give vent to pent-up fury at all who dared come near.

One day we met their owner with provisions in a handcart he’d pulled across a field, the shops two miles away.
Though unkempt his appearance, he was courteous and engaging. Polite and erudite; a gentleman indeed who chose, for reasons of his own, to live in this spot - no power, no running water - his companions day and night, through summer’s heat and winter’s cold, and whipping gales and lashing rain, two fearsomely loyal dogs.

Later on we heard them, their tone toned down - or was it just our fancy they seemed less angry than forlorn?

Today we passed again that way, along the cliff-top path, and when we neared the bunker house all we heard were distant gulls and the sounds of rustling grass.

Curious and concerned, we ventured through the thorny scrub along a narrow path, and saw the devastation where that man had lived.

Abandoned, his belongings were strewn all around, picked over by a horde, it seemed, of those with plunder in their minds.
Vultures descended on a corpse, and all they’ve left’s a wreck.
It was a tip, that man’s redoubt, the concrete walls around. And along their tops bright flowers bloomed,
Not knowing he was gone.