Public Programmes

As part of our Call to Words event, we invited serving members of the armed forces and veterans to submit original poetry reflecting their experiences of service, deployment, and conflict. This poem was selected by our panel, displayed in Poets' Corner and read at the Grave of the Unknown Warrior by actor Tom Mison.

We learn to hold position before we held anything else.   

The body a vessel for stillness, time pooling   

like water in the low places. Hours that belong   

to no one, that we tend like borrowed things   

we've forgotten how to return.   

There is ceremony in this. The checking and rechecking.   

The way we touch the same familiar surfaces,   

buckle, photograph, the date circled but not promised.   

Waiting makes devout of us all, ministering   

to the almost, the about-to. The leave that might come.   

The celebration we rehearse in our minds until   

it becomes its own kind of company. We practice   

homecoming so many times it starts to feel   

like a place we've already been.   

But loneliness keeps its own time here.   

Sits down beside you in the empty chair,   

learns your routines, knows when you'll wake   

to check if anything has changed.   

In the suspension between what was   

and what will be, you find yourself   

waiting for the sake of waiting itself,   

as if the waiting were the point, the purpose,   

the thing you've been training for all along.   

Some learned to draw it out long,   

thread it like smoke through cupped hands.   

Others made it small, hard, something   

to carry in the pocket like a stone.   

And some - but here the sentence   

doesn't finish. Here, the waiting becomes   

what waited for them instead, and we,   

still counting days, feel the space   

where voices should answer. Feel how waiting   

outlasts even those who perfected it,   

how it continues without them,   

persistent as breath.   

The light has its own schedule. Morning. Evening.   

Between them, the afternoon spreads itself thin,   

and we become reverent of the in-between,   

of duration, of the slow architecture   

of hours building themselves into days   

that look like all the others. This is the hardest part:   

to be perpetually almost, to stand ready   

at the edge of what we cannot see,   

knowing that readiness itself   

is just another name for time   

doing what it does to all of us.   

Spending us slowly, while we wait   

for it to spend us quick.