INTERCHANGE

I remember him as a small old man

quiet and happy in his bedside chair

A repat patient from World War I, watching,

never a trouble to anyone

with his light brown beret each Tuesday

when I did my morning rounds in the late Seventies

of long-stay patients, usually with TB,

in the upstairs ward at Rankin Park.

Our meetings were always brief -

few words, the stethoscopic ritual,

the laying on of hands -

then I was on my way.

But he did not have TB

and no-one could be sure

what he had, or indeed whether

he had any illness at all.

The folk who ran

Rankin Park thought this place

as good as any for this man to live.

The ward opened to a verandah that faced north

so in winter he would sit

in a rocker outside.

One Tuesday I saw he was in decline.

Nothing to be found

and nothing done.

Next week he was in bed:

he had something special for me to hear.

I bent close. "They shot them all," he said.

I pictured a fatal moment

in the trench. "They shot them all,"

he said again for emphasis.

"The bloody British shot them all.

The horses. Our horses.

The horses we brought back

to Britain at war's end."

Now as I drive along the M4

past Wallgrove, where the horses trained

I see the plumes of emu feather replicas

worn in the hats of the Brigade

atop the regiments of poles red

with blood and poppies

on the mile of median strip

at the Light Horse Interchange.

I recall my conversations at Rankin Park,

with the man, with his economy of words, his beret

and not much else. 

I think of his love for the horses

a love that sustained and troubled him for six decades.
and I feel bereft and impotent.