The Cave Poem by David Lewis Paget

A single bullet was all it took
And I needn’t have wasted that,
He sat alone in that dismal cave
In an old Field Marshall’s hat,
His eyes were sunk in that pallid face
A demented cast to his jaw,
He didn’t move as I knelt and aimed
And put an end to the war.

It was getting late, it was ‘68
When I ventured into the cave,
My friends said going spelunking was
A bit like digging your grave.
‘Expect big rats, and giant bats, ’
They said, before I’d begun,
So I added that to my haversack,
Just to be sure, a gun.

It wasn’t a normal cave I sought
But one by the autobahn,
Where I’d seen a crevice opening up
That nobody else had done,
It seemed to lead deep down in the earth
Could easily close, if found,
So I took a pick, a dynamite stick
And burrowed into the ground.

I had a lamp on my helmet, like
A miner’s, casting a beam,
And climbed on plenty of rubble
That had collapsed in a steady seam,
It led to a concrete tunnel
Plenty of rock strewn passageways,
A giant work of construction that
Lay hidden in former days.

I seemed to go on forever
Then ran into a barbed wire cone,
Blocking one of the passageways
And a sign, ‘Halt! No Go Zone! ’
The wire was rusty and fell apart
As I pushed it away to the side,
But then the sound of scuffling rats
Brought the gun out by my side.

Then finally it had opened up
Into what would appear a cave,
With flags and banners arranged about,
The glory of former days,
A corpse sat propped in an easy chair
In a uniform from then,
And there, attached to the shirt front was
A nameplate, ‘Bormann, M.’

Beyond, and under the banners was
A barely human form,
Who stared at me in the darkness there
As if I’d not been born,
The greatest conqueror of our time
And there’s no disputing that,
Lost in pain in his vast domain
For there der Führer sat.

2 April 2015