Sing (for 11.11.2023)

Sing 

Jennifer Pickup, 29.10.2023 for 11.11.2023 

 

Sunday morning, we gather at the war stone yet again,

All sombre black-clad figures in the cold November rain.

We lay down memorial wreaths, those poppies red and black,

We’ve come pay our due respects to those that we now lack. 

 

And as we stand there through the usual service of the day,

You appear beside me as if you’d never been away.

I’m older than you ever were – in fact, double your age,

I know you from a photograph – you’ve stepped straight off the page.

 

No-one else seems to notice – is it only me that sees

This handsome boy who brings a sudden stillness to the breeze?

My great-grandfather’s brother, Arthur Herbert was your name,

Just like your father’s was – the eldest son was called the same.

 

Your uniform looks new, crisp as the day it was first pressed,

Before it became muddied, and that bullet hit your breast.

You were mortally wounded, and then brought back home to die,

Lost at barely twenty-one – far too young, none can deny.

 

As you stand tall beside me, so straight-backed, tight-lipped and proud,

I search for other ghostly figures here amongst the crowd,

The unborn half a family that should be with us now –

I wonder, in another place, do they exist somehow?

 

Your children and your grandchildren, great-grandchildren like me,

Hearts destined to never beat, a sleeping family tree.

How different would things have been if you’d never gone to war,

Rewrite your story in my mind without its fatal flaw.

 

I got to meet your brother, in his nineties when he died,

But you should have been there too, living right there at his side.

The silence comes to an end – it has never been so deep,

And as the crowd begin to stir, you kiss me on the cheek.

 

I don’t know why I’m crying as I never felt your loss,

But I’ve come to learn the strength of grief and what losing costs.

I weep for what was meant to be and life that did not last,

And wish I had the power to go back and change the past.

 

Stood shoulder to shoulder, we raise our voices high in song,

And never has a hymn been sung so heartfelt or so strong,

But as the chorus comes around, you start to fade away –

It was a gift to have you here, I know you cannot stay.

 

I sing for the absent ones, the loved and missing faces,

Pray for those who fight for us in distant hostile places,

And as the cold November rain gives way to winter sun,

I know you’re just a thought away, when all is said and done.