| "Beach Burial" (1944) is a poem by Australian poet Kenneth Slessor.
It was originally published in Southerly journal in 1944, and was subsequently reprinted in the author's single-author collections and a number of Australian poetry anthologies.
The poem was written around the time of the battle of El Alamein in 1942 while Slessor was a war correspondent. It reflects his experience of seeing dead seamen being pulled from the surf and buried in the sand in graves marked with a cross bearing the words "Unknown Seaman". |
