On Remembrance Day Poem by john coldwell

All our veterans are hero’s, especially the dead one’s
Paper poppy’d, toy soldiered, military bearing,
I’m there to pretend that I might have been like them.
Remembering the glorious dead that I know nothing of.
Grainy, monochrome, unknown soldiers in lumpy uniforms,
Bayonets fixed, jerkily, unhesitatingly,
Swarming out of their trenches,
And over the top, into a shell shocked sky.

Except that one, indistinguishable in the charge,
Was stopped, arrested, on that ridge of life and death,
And slumped back motionless,
In a flickering moonscape of mud.
The first to contact the enemy, a speculative bullet or shrapnel?
Not for him the tea and foxhole,
Not for him memories of action,
They recover the fallen from the front, not the rear.

I wonder about that soldier,
Did they return and tenderly remove him?
Are his lifeless remains amongst the white stones of Ypres,
Still proudly to attention on the field of battle?
Or was he not there, that unknown soldier?
Am I the only one in which a coward can find space to reside?
Does he yet sit alone in his chair
On remembrance day?
The nurse says He never talks about the war.