Gulf Turkish Holiday Heritage Poem by Terence George Craddock (Spectral Images and Images Of Light)

“To return at last from Turkey
with my memories safely stored
between thin clear plastic pages.”

This is all I save from Turkey
where youth beauty are service bled
lifeblood devalues faster than wages.

Its January 1991 Saddam Hussein
is finally getting his ass kicked; during
the war I remained in Istanbul but

a holiday toward the scud threatened
border was too cheap to refuse; strange
watching fearful flee direction opposite

alive adrenaline rush alive dead chickens
would give warning gas was about to;
claim take our civilian collateral damage

lives; but as written record reads scuds
were never fired into National Turkish Airspace? ;
and Andrew died of virus lung infection

a few years later caught pumping gas
at a London petrol station during cold winter;
weather we had but in brief in Istanbul.


Copyright © Terence George Craddock
Quotation from the poem ‘Turkish Heritage’.