KEEPSAKE LOST: A FIRST WORLD WAR POEM BY THE MOWDOG...

Keepsake Lost

It was all right to place a keepsake

Into a pocket, or amongst one’s military equipment:

Perhaps a snap of a sweetheart,

A four-leaf clover, maybe a crucifix;

Just something to place one apart

From the company in a moment of quiet,

Or to clutch whilst writing home

To loved ones, or to caress whilst unable to sleep,

Worrying, aching, terrified and awake…

Will didn’t write home any longer.

Nor did he receive mail.

The photograph he once coveted

Lay crumpled, its memory too frail.

His girl had withdrawn her affections

But he’d felt no cause to feel contrite;

He just begged or stole scraps of paper,

Upon which his grim diary to write.

He soon lay dead in the mire at Passchendaele,

In no man’s land mown down with a thud,

Soon after scrambling out of the forward trench,

Leaving his keepsake behind in the mud…

But it was blown by a breeze after the skirmish

And near Will’s shredded corpse it fell;

At his burial it was placed inside his bloodied shirt,

To give him some kind of peace in the hell…

Pete Ray

March 2020

MY FATHER'S MUM...

MY FATHER'S DAD...

The photographs must have been special to many fighting men, whether German, Belgian, French, or Russian.

The poem just spotlights one scenario.

Sad, really… 

The images show my two grandmothers and their fighting husbands.

MY MUM'S DAD, RSM HEDGES, SEATED BEHIND THE GUY ON THE GROUND...

MUM'S MUM...

They both survived, so did their marriages…

I didn’t meet either grandfather, for both died in the 1930s…