The Word for Sorrow centres around the story of an old second-hand Latin dictionary, and particularly that of its original owner who had inscribed his name – ‘Geoffrey’ – on the flyleaf as a schoolboy in January 1900 and later fought in the disastrous eastern campaign at Gallipoli in 1915 with the Royal Gloucester Hussars. In the sequence, Geoffrey’s story is interspersed with versions of the Latin text the dictionary is being used to translate; Tristia, the harrowing exile poetry of the first century A.D Roman poet Ovid  (called here by his cognomen Naso, the name he always uses of himself in his poems), written after his mysterious banishment east from Rome to the Black Sea in A.D.8/9.

Proem: Small Town Fête

Once we’d settle for games or strung comics,
next it’s cheap set-texts, grey Penguin Classics;
moth-eaten plus fours, mould-splattered DJs –
fancy dress for all tomorrow’s parties –
vintage crop, windfall of record weather,
the false softness of a Sussex summer:
Golf Captains, Oddfellows, the Lions Club,
some bloke at the bar who once read Sartre,
dark, mudded paths to bring them here too fast,
slippered shuffle from house to ward to box.

And that August day, nineteen seventy-five,
a Latin lexicon pulled from dust pile,
mildewed, battered, pot-marked, ingrained by luck
for I knew then: here it was, my life match.

Naso off the Shelf

I dreamt my book went home again,
transformed, reformed, shuddering
like Proteus on the turn, changing shape;
no longer versed in youth’s green passion
but old age’s brown and shrivelled hate,
bound in sadness, grief’s dark script.
And I walked with it through my city’s
empty squares, footsteps soft as leaf-
fall on glittering autumn streets,
unfolding the faded map of my past life:
the Forum, the Sacred Way, the Palatine,
statues, temples, stacked libraries,
where all great works, ancient or modern,
can be read by any who might seek.
Now my book, too, tried to enter
as a guard blocked its dragging feet.
On tip-toe, noses pressed on misted pane,
we saw the touch of smoothing hand
but not for us - these lines are banned.
We heard the hush of unrolled volumes
but not of ours – by far the worst exile for them:
The shame is mine, of my Ars amatoria;
it stains each new page, sins of their father.
I talked too long of love, that was my ‘crime’
yet my ‘error’ was to see and not speak out.
And so my book is closed, my heart has died.
Poetry must, poetry can only tell the truth.
In life we have to lie to stay alive.

Between the Lines

It seems so snug here in my grave –
you can't describe it any other way:
two feet deep, piled up with earth,
cracked headstone to protect us,
a few rancid scraps of wood,
sea-salvage, to line the box,
my mackintosh on sticks for lid
(last night a five-inch centipede
decided to share my valise –
I soon made short work of it!).
Shells rattle, universe shattered,
but so far not too much damage –
one chap had his trousers blown off –
after a few hours one takes no notice.
No flies yet, well, at least, we hope
maybe because rations are so tight:
lime juice daily, tot of rum at night.
We've had a lesson in bomb-throwing
and now I am dying to have a go.
But one of us has to stay behind –
I tossed with Major Gething, lost.
The night was extraordinary, flames
soaring above the horizon like lightning
leap-frogging across stormy Wolds;
the fires of a hundred Cerney carnivals
searing the landscape, whole world lit up.
All I could do was stand and watch.
Gething killed. Wilf Barton killed.
Gething! I tossed with him and lost.
My poor Sergeant Honey dead.
I must say I feel sad about that –
so many who came from home with us.
Today we had a go back at the Turks.
Good show: I hit my bag the last two shots.
I wish you were here to see the lights.
Funny, I feel I’ve been under fire all my life.

Last Orders

It should be our feast day at home, village fête –
the street all lit up, stalls set out, but instead
we're pulling ticks from shirts, waiting for first shot …

I've been walking too long in the paths of the dead
like trench fly cooling my feet in their icy tracks –
even here, in Gloucs, my car trails a slick of blood

on frost-flayed lanes, dictionary swapped for map
and faded handbill: RECRUITS WANTED AT ONCE.
(MEN TO HAVE THE OPTION OF FOREIGN SERVICE):

'26 joined' scored across in flowery pencil:
pulling men not pints: Kings Head, Elliott Arms, Cerney –
lads that had known each other since the cradle

too eager to share the next stage of their journey.
Today I sip coffee in those same, morning-sad bars;
heads shake, shoulders shrug, but there’s no sign,

no last orders for 26 lost and home-sick ghosts.
By the Bull at Fairford old boys in buttoned coats
and checked ties debate Afters: custard or ice cream? –

Wilf Barton if he'd lived, Alf Honey, Hugh Gething.
Out in the sleet-blurred square, a black van slows,
flesh for freight; back doors slide open, rattle

as butcher steps out in blooded apron, slings a pig’s
half carcass across his shoulder. Stops. Then gently shifts
the weight as if carrying a comrade from battle.

The Word for Sorrow

On the fly leaf I’ve written
my new date, my own name:
Josephine Balmer, January 6th 2005
Do we find a text or does it find us?

Two brothers caged in eastern prison,
unable to stand, cramped in darkness,
passed the years by crossing Paris
in their mind’s eye: arrondissement
by arrondissement. One would pick
two points, the other would trace
the way between – a city they had visited
only on crumpled map, by fingertip.
A path they had never taken.
A path they would always tread.

Does it matter if the journey exists
only in a captive’s imagination
or the arch of a writer’s eyebrow?
If Naso tricked us, never left Rome;
if ‘Geoffrey’s’ story isn't all his own?
And would I like them if we'd met:
the player-poet with an ego even
greater than his sense of grievance?

Or retired Major, double-barrelled,
Master of the Hunt, local magistrate,
for whom Latin meant status, gender,
but never learning, love, literature?
And when the old order disappeared,
let it go for the rest of us to scavenge –
the mark of power for two millennia –
leaving our speech forever scarred,
like the taint of Naso’s barbarian burr,
no going back, known world changed.

And how to tell if these shades I summon
thank or curse me, condone or condemn?
If this new life isn't a new death;
if they'd hate this fresh shroud of flesh,
fret, like harbour-bound trawlermen,
for the heart-stop stench of gutted bone?

Yet once in the cemetery at Marazion
as darkness fell, a priest, surgeon
to heal the fractured Bay, make it whole,
I sensed two figures, unseen ghosts
at each shoulder, as if my ancestors
had risen from the grave at which
I’d just picked out a weed like editor
adjective or politician, statistic:
the house-maid and the miner,
guiding my path between fallen stars
before language, semantics, divide us.

I know my words are not their words,
I know my thoughts are not their thoughts
but every past must have a present.
And their cells are now my cells
and their matter is now my matter:
sometimes rain-hewn granite, the gorse
curved, carved by moorland squalls;
sometimes ore-bled river, forged course
from Kenidjack to Cape Cornwall.

And today in Sussex it’s the drizzled gulls,
risen, flagged, like a sudden thought,
from Ghyll to Weald to Down,
where ancestors aren't flesh and bone
but the musty chatter and tented laughter
of a summer’s day at hospital fete:
all those months waiting for life to begin,
a restless Celt in the land of Saxon, Latin,
learning these new lines of dominion.


We none of us need a dictionary
to define the word for sorrow:
Tomis, Gallipoli, Salonica, name
upon name etched on empty graves;
date upon date end-stopped in one same year.
Or a plaque in a country cemetery
that can't even reach double figures,
Catullus' flower passed by the furrow …

We are all translating the same story
search same words in same thesaurus.
What drives us on, keeps us to our path,
in every version, is not gain but loss.