Veteran Poem by Kevin Eaglesfield

He knows he's not a person now,
A curiosity, a relic one day a year.
The only day he feels a person.
A wreck in a wheelchair,
Spoken to loudly and subtitles
For his perfect English.
He sits, respectful, sad, quiet,
Shoulders draped in memory's cloak.
Yes, the oldest can still cry.
They know how old, how few left, how many years
And the time, but the numbers mean nothing.
A hundred or ten thousand,
They can't grasp it after two generations
Of pathos, not pain.
Their loss is clean, simple and whole,
Not Death's fingers pinching heads
Off half their world at once,
Smashing thoroughly and at random
With His bony fist.
They don't see what an arm or a leg or a head
Looks like by itself, or what colour insides are,
Or wipe their workmates from numb faces
That were just as old then.
They've never known their town chessboarded,
Black and white, grief and relief,
And guilt at relief.
They'll never know because he did.