Personal Thoughts of a Stranger

The Great War

We slept on old creaking barracks
Deep in a grassy trench where no one ever looked The horror of the gunfire had penetrated into the ground
Our hands were bruised, our souls scarred.

We felt the frost fastening on our hands,
Skin withering in the cold gusts
Bramble grew everywhere, rocks turned into sand
And we stood there, forgotten, rusting.

The silence was deafening,
Like the quiet before the storm
But we no stopped panicking at the chorus of gunnery
We listened to the birds instead
humming in midst of the fire rumbling
We sung with them, sometimes, in unison
- Cries of powerless men, yearning for a sweet release.

We lost so many so early,
But our agonies faded in the drudgery
Patriotic ambition felt like a forgotten dream.
Every day, I shivered in my bed, half asleep
Lost in the warmth of the coal lit in my house
Thousands of miles away.
When the fire flickered or the water dripped
I sought comfort and went where
My heart belonged.
My boy, running in the pink sand,
Staring at the twinkling stars
Or my wife laughing, her warmth spreading through my arms.
My hands were still withered, my arms still covered in grime
But in that moment,
My eyes shone and my lips curled into a sad smile.

The war went on;
And the flame inside me grew
Like the fires of hell outside.
And we all fought, Like pawns in a game
Hands in a clock
We were unstoppable.

One day, I woke up and found others
Rejoicing in the beam of the sunlight
That filtered through the pores
We came in thousands, went in hundreds With their loss in our chest,
Heavy as lead, we went back.

I remember strutting towards my house,
I remember the blossoming joy in my heart,
In the stark cold night
I stood like a rigid flame in a storm.

But I found the shutters and doors closed,
I peeked inside and found mice skipping around.
I saw no coals burning, no smoke escaping the brick chimney.
I just knew.

I am here now, staring at the sunset
Tracing the sand, mindlessly.
Above me, I see
Stars moving and shining like nothing else,
And I feel empty
A man without a past or a future
Always lost in the sand and the sunset.

The war is over now,
Smoke has cleared, people smile now
But the war will live forever in my heart.
And in every fibre of my body
To remind me of all that could have been.