by David Norris-Kay
Brothers-In-War
I didn't understand,
when I saw Grandmother's tears
splash onto the roses:
her busy trowel paused,
in the warm summer garden
of my childhood
or when Mother gazed wistfully
at a faded photograph
of a uniformed man
leaning jauntily against a truck
staring nonchalantly
into a non-existent future.
Now I know
that these moments of sadness
held the horrors of war:
sudden oblivion by gunfire
in the Somme's stinking mud.
Searing Egypt's shuddering tanks
and a shrieking-shrapnel waste
where the dead were piled
high as sandbags
Men who never knew
the peace of roses;
were harvested by lancing lead...
Most didn't live 'to fight another day':
so-still they lay, soldiers Norris and Kay.
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2010-02-01 01:43:13.
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