All For King & Country (Poetry)

Did they a rousing welcome hope they’d find
on their return to England safe and sound?
Did that help keep them focused — heart and mind
fixed firm on duty, feet on foreign ground?

Or did they falter — filled with doubt and dread
appalled and shaken by the truth they saw
lying in the mud — the maimed and dead
as proof of crimes committed during war?

We only guess and glean what facts we can
from figures — cold statistics — and those lines
of anguished poetry that rhyme and scan
a century while history enshrines

the names — Sassoon and Owen, Brooke and Yeats
Kipling, Edward Thomas, John McCrae
whose Flanders Fields washed red the Pearly Gates
these share the silence of Remembrance Day

and mourn the folly — all the senseless waste
of Youth’s quiet promise ended with death’s groan
brave hopes of glory grievously misplaced
fought hard and fell, so failed to make it home