Remembrance Sunday 2023

To my grandfather

We came each one of us to pay respects
Some wearing hard-fought medals on their chest,
Some bearing those too frail by now to stand,
But all of us by memories possessed

Of those who went before us, fought and fell,
And left behind a story incomplete.
And thus we gathered round in drenching rain,
As puddles formed and filled around our feet,

Our thoughts not fixed upon the grieving sky,
Nor on the storm that in the silence roared,
But on the loved ones we remember still,
And name in private prayer before the Lord.

October 1916. A clerk thrust
Into the horror of the war receives
An emergency commission to replace
The dead. But now is not the time to grieve

For in the hellfire club machine guns pound
Away both night and day, and those who fall
Are merely numbers added to the list,
That tells the inhumanity of it all,

While comrades struggle on in thick deep mud
To carry, load and fire against the odds,
And trust that when the judgement comes
They will get mercy from almighty God

So hard to find among the drenching rain
That soaks the feet, and washes hope away.
It was a miracle this clerk survived –
And why his grandson gives such thanks today.