Camouflage Revisited

My battledress
hangs silently in a cupboard

Occasionally
when the house is empty
I take it out and walk again
in a wilderness of bald granites,
thick red earth
bleached grasses and gloomy thickets
of unfriendly trees

A place where one night
stalking shadows spat fire…

History’s finger has since written
the final chapter of a lonely war
The victors and the vanquished
forgotten and passed by
their memories locked
in cupboards.

Mike Hagemann is a 42 year old English teacher who lives in Cape Town, South Africa. He has been writing, on and off, for a number of years.  He has published a work of non-fiction called The Shepherds Who Throw Stones and he dabbles in short stories and poetry.

The poem printed above arises from his period of military service in 1979 and 1980.  He was originally a citizen of Rhodesia, (now called Zimbabwe) and he fought in the last 2 years of the civil war that raged there from 1972 to 1980.

Email: Mike Hagemann

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