Vox Populi
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Joan E. Bauer: On the Brink, 1938
A happy vicar I might have been…
-George Orwell
On the Spanish battlefield, he would crawl
on his stomach searching for potatoes.
The POUM (Marxist Workers’ Party) made him
an officer & that first night he gained his men’s
respect by drinking them under the table.
Later what his men remembered:
a straightforward, unaffected man, despite
the Eton accent, who feared rats, not bullets.
*
What gave respite in that happy year after Spain,
that year in Wallington: his wife Eileen, his son
& gardening. Digging, planting, tending hens & goats.
He’d milk Muriel the cow & take the poodle Marx
for walks. After the Hitler-Stalin pact, he tried
to enlist, but the British army wouldn’t take him.
His neck, shot through by sniper fire, had healed,
but he’d been six months in a TB sanitarium.
No recording survives of his flat & damaged voice.
Writing Homage to Catalonia, he worried
he’d be misunderstood. Even his mother was
puzzled by his books. This is not the Eric we knew.
.
Copyright 2017 Joan E. Bauer
.
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Joan E. Bauer (photo:Ruth Ella Hendricks)
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Glad to see that Joan shares my appreciation for Orwell. Homage to Catalonia and Down and Out in Paris and London: if you haven’t read them, you should.
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Dear Joan: a tremendous poem, as usual. Here’s a posting I put on FB about it. Hi Everyone,
There are authors who write historical novels, but it’s rare to find a poet who writes historical poems and yet we have such a poet in Joan E. Bauer. Every time I read a poem of Joan’s I not only learn something, but am treated to an historical tale written with the eloquence and lyricism of a formidable poetic genius. Here is such a poem about George Orwell that appeared on the wonderful internet site Vox Populi recently. Enjoy:
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