The Anabasis of Godspeed
Cracked potholed macadam up to the groveless school. Heat waves strode in bronze. Horace’s forehead wrinkled terrified of grammar. During this period many officers and men were sent to the Imperial School of Instructions at zeitoun for courses of machine gun and signalling and advanced telephone courses and Lewis gun and bombing and strokes gun and a general course of the compressed gold land. It was around that time Horace asked Godspeed if John the Baptist could read. Godspeed answered by splitting Horace’s taw marble into fissiparous chaff of glass. That day left between them a Milvian bridge never to be crossed.
Cloudburst. The leap year was postponed when the Governor General of jamaica Sir Howard Felix Hanlan Cooke O.N. C.D. G.C.M.G. G.C.V.O. K.St.J sent carton boxes of poppies to Happy Grove. Count Lasher and his lickey lickey boom boom informers walked slowly down rows in the chapel and placed a foreign petal in each opened palm unknowing of what panic they had sown.
Moonlit rainbow on Christmas Eve. The nile was violet and the mokattam hills were rosy in colour. Micrococci ate away flesh down to the bones and further down to the soul. The strength of the battalion stood at 645 officers and 1700 other men proceeded to emmaus across the painful clearness of the sand infinite as the sea. One held a sprig of psalm against the frosted distance.
Men arrived from the dardanelles caked in mud. They kept their mouths shut while burying rabbit wires for artillery at queens hill and didn’t speak when they ate their biscuits olives and dates spirited with sand. Tanks well-spruced like white parasols sailed into the oasis at kut and were surprise-bombed into new illumination.
The moon smote him by day. His face was a mist of water above the pages of his Britannica where he read “The island teemed with agoutis peccaries opossums racoons alligators iguanas and armadillos” creatures evaporating off the pages and from the hills and gullies heavy with sunlight where he now set his eyes lunar and remote and full of years lightly borne with history.
Around this time under circumstances short of no pomp and pageantry Godspeed’s birth defect name of Ishi entered the school’s roster so he unsettled the clear river in jabbok and sank like a polished stone to its bottom.
