People I knew who escaped alive
From Arnhem, the Bridge too Far,
That Unsuccessful campaign
Of The Second World War.
But for a leg broken in practice
Richard would have been there
Maybe jumping to his death
Through the clear still air.
Captain Bill, then a glider pilot.
A hazardous way of arrival
Cutting down the chances
Of his amazing survival.
Old Alan the Para
Not long passed on
Who yarned over a pint
About times long gone.
Other people I served with,
Names gone beyond recall,
Shades of faces remembered,
Surviving Heroes one and all.
Eighty years later I’m here
In a state of anticipation
To tour the museum
Set at its exact location.
Categories:
arnhem, appreciation, memorial, war,
Form: Rhyme
i.
I had lost the entirety
of my muchness
I watched a white rabbit
dart in my peripheral
as walkabout found my feet,
the Red Queen laughs raucously
dangling me at the end of a Scepter
ii.
Tweedle Dee and Tweedle dum
know I am not Alice,
and that this is not my home
iii.
Arnhem calls to me
as the earth trembles
briefly,
I feel the beating spirit
through the bush,
and it tempts me with magic
flowing from the Dreamtime
iv.
so I wait
stroking the rainbow serpent
but ever watchful
of escape to a place
my heartbeats home
in the land of Never and Oz
Categories:
arnhem, imaginationme,
Form: Free verse
Streaking skyward the tracers rip
Into hanging soldiers
Falling about into mayhem
Pulsing through blood-filled ears
Hearing comrades scream
Understanding nothing
This is the war I found…
Hatred filled hardened hunter
Into smashed building
Homes pulverized rubble
Strewn about the decaying mass
The scorched metal burning
Bodies of the fallen men
The miasma of war I forever inhale…
Tigers rolling through billowed flame
Firing upon burnt battlefield blindly
Retreating in terror I leave the voices
Calling as I my boots tamp by arms
Reaching for safety I couldn’t render
Brothers abandoned in the Arnhem snow
These are the ghosts of war who haunt me….
Battle’s percussion on the horizon distant
I fade through the fields upon the Rhein
Farmhouses glow a midnight path
Walking to the beat of gun fire echoes
Off the walls of a shelter a little boy sits
Unafraid of the man feeding him chocolate
In the crater of a bomb…
This flash of hope my salvation from war.
Categories:
arnhem, introspection, life, loss, social,
Form: Free verse