Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,/He lay in the four foot box as in his cot./No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
The nonexistence of eye-catching scars means that the deceased may have tolerated internal injuries. The bruise cannot exclusively be used to gauge the magnitude of the deceased’s injury, for it is inconsequential.
as my mother held my hand/In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
Although the speaker’s mother does not depict any tears, she is grieving on the inside for her loss. The mother curtails herself from showing tears so that she can validate to the speaker that she is sturdy despite their privation.
For six months you stayed cartographer/Charting my friend from husband towards father
The still birth become apparent when the woman was six months pregnant. The still born child was the couple’s foremost child for the husband was anticipating being more than a husband after the child’s parturition.
On lonely journeys I think of it all/Birth of death, exhumation for burial
A still birth is comparable to birthing death for a stillborn child is born while unresponsive. As a result, such children are entombed almost immediately. The delivery of a stillborn child is analogous for unearthing of a body from a woman’s womb after which is buried.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them/Between my finger and my thumb/the squat pen rests/I’ll dig with it.
The speaker parallels himself to his grandfather and father who were prosperous farmers. The speaker concedes that he may not be in capable in farming like them. Nevertheless, he will use the pen as his spade to write. For the speaker, digging by way of a spade is parallel to writing with a pen.
