How could they know what lay ahead,
When called from quiet quarters.
From friends and family naïve led,
And unborn sons and daughters.

Everything they loved and knew,
Was blown a kiss goodbye.
A place the boy to adult grew,
Left behind with silent cry.

Their world of colour to sepia faded,
In a memoried still life scene.
And which, all nearly lost and traded,
A heaven unknown had been.

Home, to maelstrom; worlds apart,
Where saplings shouldn't be.
Nascent shoots and hopeful start,
From fertile soil to scree.

Warm words in cold breast pockets,
Letters easing far off fear.
Authors clutching close-worn lockets,
To sense their lost back near.

Never would homelands be the same,
So many of its young, cruel gone.
Lives to which they brief laid claim,
On which the sun too briefly shone.

A peopled crop in a foreign field,
Of blast-sown poppyseed.
Yet, a purpose in that earth revealed,
Where did those veins of valour bleed.

For the freedoms which they left behind,
Were defended, safe for all.
And had they lived this proof to find,
Would have welcomed war’s cold call.

Proud memorials on village greens,
Are these heroes now returned.
Having given all, their only means,
For what they hadn’t known they yearned.