NOVEMBER 11th 1919 - STRANGERS NOW! ( (with the stats U K WW1)
THE WAR - were overSolders - matlows - marines - airmen
P O W's
Wounded - less fingers - hands - arms - feet - legs
Those deaf and blind - some had lost their genitals
With no noses - faces - scared - for life - suffering
The affects of being gassed - just likely - of British gas
Those with minds shot away - shell shock
Now they call shell shock - P T S D - today
Returning from The War
Returning - in dribs and drabs
None the same as when they marched off to - That War
The dead - left behind
Laying under foreign fields
Many have no known graves
Some turn up b found when fields - being dug up for drains - new roads - houses
Factory's - The War - makes an appearances - skulls - with a message
NO MORE NO MORE!
Sadly looks like no ones listening!
Mothers - wives - fathers - meting all trains
In the hope - their sons - husbands on one
Returning - a live at least - maybe suffering
Memory - loss - just not on any list!
A forlorn hope - for the woman - waiting
Asking - begging - the returning - did they
Know of Harry - Tom - or of Dick?
Showing them a photo - of Harry - Tom - Dick
In their uniforms - only '' Na , lady , never met 'im ''
'' So sorry , lady cant help yer ''
The woman - mothers - wife's - sisters - sweat harts
Found 1919 - an empty year - the year - a year - of
Deepening year of pain - a year of knowing - their man never coming home!
That - husbands - fathers - sons - sweet harts - never coming back - from The War
Those who did - just not the same - who took the train off to war
Somert - had changed with in their men folk - did come back
Not - just those showing wounds - even those who had no wounds to show
Of their war
Even those who were obvious suffering from shell shock
Were just not the same men! Such strange men at that!
Mothers - fathers - no longer - felt - they were getting the spiritual support
They craved - so in needed of in 1919 - to understand why their men had died for
Church - chapel - had let them down - help to get their sons to go off -
To that War! Religion was losing - it - it's control - power over them now
Mothers - fathers - turned - to spiritualism
Sure - we'd say to day - they were fraudsters - charlatans - but were not priests - vicars - little more than con artist - charlatans them selfs?
spiritualism - spiritualist - gave the mothers - fathers - the felling
They could say they loved - their Johnny - they loved him - hear Johny
Say , he - loved them - that their - Johnny - was all right now
That he was in a better place - now - whats wrong with that?
The woman - found them selfs with men - who were strangers
Sat in the same room - cook for - eating meals with - strange men
Laying in bed with - having sex with - with strange men!
Woman made widows by The War - left with children
In need of a man - to - be dads - help them with the children
Marred - any available men - some younger - other men much older
Total killde U K 704,803 , men killed during - wounded - 2,272,998*
during The War of 1914 - 1918 - many went on dieing long after the war were over
So number of men - in short supply!
Woman who wrote such patriotic poetry at the beginning of That War
Wrote their poetry then poppet in to the post - to the local papers
Intention to shame - men to volunteer - march off to war! To do their bit
For God - King and Empire!
To do and kill and die!
As The War dragged on - year after year!
The local papers - published the names those killed - along side their poetry
Wonder just what they were thinking - in 1919?
Were they shamed - felt shame - by what they had wrote - posted to the local paper? During the early years of That War?
As they read the casualty lists - in the same local papers? There patriotic poetry Appeared in? I wonder now as I type this in 2016. a hundred years it were 1916
Two more years of slaughter to go!
Did the giggling girls - who gave white feathers to young men - feel any gilt?
When they heard those same young men had been killed? Or were less an arm
A leg - blind - deaf - faces - shot off - just somert - beyond any words to describe
Many woman - changed as well - became more confidant - as they undertook
MENS - work! Working at Ritchbourer - secret port
Woman handling - stuff for The War - shells - made at Faversham - by woman
Just like them!
The town - morns - trying to get back to normality
But what were normal at the start of 1914 - lost
For ever - the world - Ramsgate - Thanet - had changed!
*Other stats: Those Buried with their names: 587,989
Buried with out their names: 187, 861
Those therefor not buried at all 338,955 , this includes those killed at sea.
ken d williams
The Dyslexic Wordsmith
Poetry by ken d williams
Read 520 times
Written on 2016-10-02 at 17:22
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Lawrence Beck |
