THE FIRST DAY OF THE SOMME

Brown leather cracked and dried
Envelopes your boyhood image
Though time has faded slowly
Through passing of the years
Your impish grin remains
Free of future tears.

The rat infested trenches
Soldiers delousing one another
Humour rather risque
Lying letters to mother.

He swears the dead that mud swallowed
Often raise an arm to wave
To each side of no mans land
Their bodies a pathway laid.

Here Death is our intimate friend
We live with him we breathe
Until our time comes
We sense him in our dreams.

A landscape here craves
To be beautiful as before
But the bombs and gas, artillary shells
Have made a ghost beyond the door.

Your soul it whispers
July the first, 1916
One of 19,240 fallen
You remain forever a teen.