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.