I crouch beside your body

I crouch beside your body clutching your cold hand, letting stiffened fingers impart to my supple ones the comfort death brings. Yet supine you still lie in the warm summer twilight as you lay once under snow. Why do you thaw by your long hibernation this winter of mine? At your side I can feel how very easy it is, my Belgian brother, to sleep under the stars feeling nothing but a hand which presses your own. Do you perhaps wonder why a poor mortal creature seeks to comfort you, who are beyond comfort? Why he seeks comfort himself? O my dead soldier, my verviétoise friend, Bouzou sleeps in his music as you sleep in bronze, far from all battlefields, and by a sleep reminds us that it is not very hard just being dead. - Returning in high summer to revisit the war memorial at Verviers after hearing Lekeu’s violin sonata the previous evening. -