Duty?

(This is imagined, as my mother died when I was one year old…)

*

From the earliest of days when my learning began,

‘You are beautiful’, my mother told me,

and I learned what was right in those days as a child,

all at the feet of my mother.

*

And when I reached five I was led as I cried

to the kindergarten just down the street,

told to ‘Sit on the ground’, other children around

to be taught at the feet of another.

*

I grew up quite quickly and the years they passed by,

then told that brave I must be,

I was ordered to go to the camp in the cold,

where they taught me to fight like the others.

*

In my uniform neat I marched to the beat

of the band on the great parade ground,

they gave me a rifle, learned to shoot in a trifle,

‘Now go out, do your duty’, they said.

*

I was marched up a hill and ordered to fight

or to die, whichever came first;

in my sights then I saw, the soul of my foe

and found I could not pull the trigger.

*

A rifle shot fired, as ordered out there,

found its mark and I fell to the ground,

and in dying I saw not the face of a foe

but the grief on the face of all mothers.

*

Dennis Crompton © 1994

(first published www.denniscrompton.wordpress.com 2013)