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James Bell

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Who He Once Was

This is the man who drove a huge truck
for hours without sleeping and remembered
his eyes closing for a second in the convoy.

He did not say when or where it happened
though he’d talk about Russians and German
prisoners in Austria just after the war,

but this is what he did, who he once was.
He still drove big trucks when I came along
and when knee high to one of their thick tyres

was allowed a ride in its cabin’s noisy rattle,
awed at moving so fast, so far away from the ground.
And this is the man whose photographs I possess

now that she and he are both gone. Yes, there are
the trucks again, cumbersome, old-fashioned,
as seen in black and white films from the forties.

And that was it, that was his time, just as
this is mine. His photographs are the elegy
for the man he once was before I saw him

finally weak and bowed in a hospital bed
where he lay in drugged pain one day
and the next day was gone, taken away

on a small wheeled trolley close to the ground,
the man who once stood barrel chested, at
attention, in a Royal Artillery sergeant’s uniform

smiling, proud, for the box camera and her
and later, for me, in Kodak monochrome
in a time that sees everything in colour.

Now she and he and the trucks have all gone,
like the dying empire that wanted them both -
but most of all him and who he became for a time.

 

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