This Week I Be Mostly Reading...

'England is, above all, the country of the amateur, and the wireless operators, couriers and saboteurs who went to France, were therefore amateurs, officers working behind enemy lines. They had a fine contempt for the professional spy. They were ordinary men and women in that they sprang from ordinary walks of life. The don, the stock-broker, the bird-watcher, the doctor, the insurance agent, the shorthand typist, the widow, the anthropologist and the head-waiter...'

Odette
Jerrard Tickell. (p.44)

See Saboteurs.

No Real Job

Nocturnal bride
Wears black tonight
Grainy pictures
Of a faded wedding
I am naked, draped in leaves
My hand clasping my heart
All foliage suffocates

A fragment of my mirror (broken)
A shard of my heart
Books line the walls
Who lives in those leather-bound volumes
Even they are soon to be forgotten
So I devoured you
And I relished every morsel
Torn and bleeding
The grey sky in my head
From some ancient tale
Pale ghosts hovered over me.

Eye to Eye With Their Ally

Saboteurs

In the milky light of the bleak dawn
Agents and saboteurs awake
Preparing to assassinate
Some dark lieutenant
Of the occupying power
They will not be acclaimed
They will not even be named
They will remain
Unknown, a footnote
They dislocate our fate
We wait. Where are they now?

Missing, presumed dead,
He said. Martyred
Wanton devastation
The butchery of me.
They took lessons
In the art of destruction
Sabotage is a craft
They were taught
How to kill
With their bare hands

A veil was drawn
Over their future
They did not know
What their mission was
Until the final moment
When they were despatched
By air and by sea
Smuggled in by gunboat
And parachute
Eye to eye with their ally,
With their enemy
Upstart amateurs
Armed only with cyanide
Inside a suicide pill.

Dedicated to member of SOE
(see soon to be established on Drowning In Academia)