(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)
