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'Rest In Peace Harry Patch..'
| Open Poetry #45 |
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'Rest In Peace Harry Patch..' |
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sullivanthepoet.com Member
since 2007-06-28
Posts 154Devon, England |
‘Rest In Peace Harry Patch..’ “And did those feet in ancient times;” Walk ankle deep each in gore and fatherless limbs and the spent essence of zealous and imperfect youth; As strove each and every ill natured and misguided nation to build, in their own fractured and distorted images, their new and utopian Jerusalems? To build their fragile empires, and their emerald cities, on the bones and the bodies and the everlasting graves of the faceless and forgotten fallen of a thousand nameless and tear sod generations. Ten thousand obedient and expendable armies under proudly godward thrust colours and marching all arrogant and manly and pious in their shadows... Until time and bleak accommodation cast each to the inevitable funeral pyres of greed and ambition; And to the wet mouthed blasphemies and bloodlusts of a legion of cruel and vindictive gods... “Or close the wall up with our English dead!” As in staunch and dam and defiant bloody bulwark piled we all, in our outrage and in our best intent, heap on putrefying heap the bodies of our dead and near dead; On which to climb the blood slicked ramparts of our own self righteous and sanctimonious martial indignation. With God and gods our cause assured to turn back, repel and smite, with the wrath of those same deaf and blind gods each foul invader from our shores and our pages; Those same deaf gods laud loud in each opposing heart. And, as all and in all each war; Each war to end all wars; All spoke so easy and found so hard in the eye of man. Laid now cheek by jowl with its gore spat and exhausted and futile fellows; Silent and unheard in the must and amnesiac graveyard of victory’s imagined history. Its lessons lost and unlearned and soon forgotten from the minds and hearts of hostile man until again... “I believe it is peace for our time." Until again that cracked and hollow bell tolls loud, the morbid and discordant death’s knell of yet another sorrowed and hollow eyed graveside generation; Solemn requiem bell to the grieving heart broke and lost child weeping mothers and bereft and sonless fathers that elegy millennia on bloodied and rag hearted millennia. The styx of all human existence swole again and raging in war spate with the stolen tears of the lost and scattered; Endless and sinless the sons and daughters of all the years. Torn each whole and bleeding in sorrow and in pain from the reckless loins of a lamenting and godforsaken Adam. And yet, in feral and stone heart abandon, do still the wet lipped politicos and their fearful and fretful generals; Their anxious, dribbling and wild eyed Caesars; Lessoned not one caution from wounded aeons of futility, toss cheaply their unfulfilled seed encore into the inferno. “And at the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them..” And in remembering never has one broken heart borne shameful man’s wretched inhumanity to his brother so long; Nor one soul laboured on so oppressed by man’s deeds and its dreadful doings and carried unspoken the weight of all its sins and its untold miseries with so little complaint. No one pair of gentle eyes ever obliged to bear, tear filled and untarnished, witness to the reckless horrors of three centuries; The terrible steel and fire and sulphur forged scythes of Lucifer’s dreadful Autumns; Thunder wracked and lightning dawned in the gathering in of his gore soaked harvest again... And again. Nor yet one tender mind forced endure the livid scars so long of his own forced and unnatural barbarity in foreign fields; Has ever a single soul embodied all that is of the best and of the worst in man in the light of their one frail and flickering candle; And in that light; So captured the hearts and minds of a nation... “Rest in peace Harry Patch: Rest in peace...” © Sullivan the Poet 2009 |
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| © Copyright 2009 Sullivan - All Rights Reserved | |||
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Margherita Member Seraphic
since 2003-02-08
Posts 22236Eternity |
Wow! Stunning write. Went to look who this Harry Patch was ... amazing really. Love, Margherita |
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sullivanthepoet.com Member
since 2007-06-28
Posts 154Devon, England |
Thanks Margherita... I am flattered you enjoyed it... |
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GBride Senior Member
since 2009-07-02
Posts 538 |
Reminds me of the opening pages of Richard the third. What a thrilling write!!! |
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sullivanthepoet.com Member
since 2007-06-28
Posts 154Devon, England |
Why thank you Gbride... High praise indeed to be compared with Willy Shakespeare himself! Delighted you enjoyed so... |
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