First Edit: Remembrance Day 2013

[Richard]

First Edit:

Remembrance Day 2013

my grandfather
bequeathed me no formal wealth
all I have left
is a portrait
and his medals

he was fifteen
when he marched through Italy
watched friends die
and killed
other men’s friends

he never told me heroic stories
so it always seemed to me
that in war
death is a hungry child
blindfolded
and bobbing for apples

my grandfather
would sit at the kitchen table
and talk to ghosts

he died when I was young
and many years
passed
before I accepted
that his sacrifice
was my true inheritance


Original Version:

Remembrance Day 2013 

my grandfather
fifteen
marched through Italy,
watched friends die
and killed
other man’s friends

in war
death seems
a hungry child
blindfolded
and bobbing for apples-
each bite a man

my grandfather,
too proud for a pension,
too shell-shocked to drown death,
would sit at the kitchen table
and talk to ghosts

I feel pride
when I think of my grandfather
in his uniform
posing in that portrait on my wall
smiling a soldier’s smile

I feel pride
because he was man
who choose
to give all he had