POW

Prisoner in another land

Where the soul’s starvation was as bleak
As the body’s hunger.
Still you worked the land
As you had as a boy
Hardly more than that then,
A witness to battlefield
And the long march eastward
To other fields of wheat and pasture
To kye and horse like those you knew
In the parks of home.

So a pact was made
With yourself and the beasts
With the father and mother of the enemy.
Perhaps because you were kind,
Decent in your way,
Coexistence was easier to bear than anger.

What point to carry warfare in the heart?
Or spoil what ease you found
With bitterness and bile.

A little language, some of your own
And some from your captors’ lips,
Spoke of something else.

Somewhere far away, east of here,
Poland maybe or Germany
Something better,
Something human carried you.

You laboured and you wrought
Far from the struggle.
You faced, in that green prison
And your gaolers’ eyes,
What walls there were;
Came through in the end,
Reconciled;
Came home in the end
And spoke well enough of them.

© BH 2014

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One for the old man. Lots of WW1 stuff around but I thought of him and his time in WW2. I thought of the silence they all brought back, all those men who went out with derring-do and found hell. Then they had to endure it and find a way back to some sort of peace. Silence, I think, was the only cure.

BTW. This is one of a sequence, For the Falling - Silence, Duty, Brave, POW. They're all here. Because they have to be.