How I Did It: The Dead Soldier
Charlotte Couse is a recent participant on Level Up! our poetry workshop designed for those looking to level up their writing and get published. Here Charlotte shares her poem The Dead Solder and explains below how she wrote and edited the piece.
Charlotte Couse
The Dead Soldier
The current sucks its breath, pulls my boat
towards the mermaid on the rocks —
a naked pearl moon — & I whip round like
a reel when I wind in the catch. My boat
splinters, spills me into the Atlantic.
I’m in a night garden on the seabed,
breath stoppered in my chest. Long weeds plume up
like water through blow holes, their fronds lit by
tiny phosphorescent fish. I see her —
female form scale-silver & veinless.
She hands me a crystal cup of red wine,
dark as blood & scented of sharpened knives.
I shake my head, look down — blood’s swirling
at my feet, flowing from the blue-lipped corpse
of a young soldier, throat open in a last gasp.
I’ve heard of him, the boy private, who fled
the fort at Athlone, along the Shannon
to the Kilkee cliffs, where he took a cook’s
knife to this throat & fell. The mermaid kneels,
puts her hand on his anemone hair,
& looks up at me, her eyes spoked sea-glass.
“I come to the rocks when I sense sadness”,
she says, “it’s so deliciously strange, like
a windfall apple plucked from the waves”.
My chest starts to ache, & the blood rises.
All I remember after is waking
at dawn, my fellow fishermen wresting
me from the waves. Now I smell
sour apples everywhere & no longer
go to sea where blood darkens the water.
I’ve always liked the solitary life,
so I take the cloth, though I don’t believe
everything they say. I bless the suicides,
bury them in the church grounds at night. They
sleep peacefully there — pearls tucked in their shells.
How I Did It
When I was a child, my grandmother used to recite “The Fairies” by William Allingham to me, which I loved. Later as an adult, I thought it very strange to have a child’s corpse in the middle of the poem. This has inspired me to write magical poems which deal with death in some way, and I have been using Jane Wilde’s Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland as inspiration. The feedback I received from the Level Up session was to make the poem more coherent, so readers can follow the narrative more easily, so I edited the poem with that in mind and added an extra verse (about the soldier) as I needed to explain who he is, particularly as he is the subject of the poem.
About Charlotte
I live Wareham in rural Dorset and work as an acupuncturist, massage therapist and herbalist. During lockdown I rekindled my love of writing poetry. I have recently had spiritual poetry published in Amythyst Review, a folklore poem published in Gramarye and a poem commended in Cannon Poets’ Sonnet or Not competition.
