Barn Find Poem by Gabriel SimpsonLaw

Hard monument to bloody days
Darkly in the shadows lies
Hidden here from grateful gaze
Of nation she had come to save

Thousands of her brothers fell
Shredded in the teeth of hell
To breathe their last and still were made
Unless disturb’ed by the waves

To purchase freedom with their blood
(Precious then more precious now)
They came across the channel’s flood
And with life’s source the sand endowed

Save she who made it ‘cross that sand
On, on to tangled hinterland
And there abandoned wounded lay
Enshrouded in a farm’s decay

Until unto my sight she yields
On pilgrimage to foreign fields
Her ghost remains for all to see
Beyond the beach at Normandy

*****

Friend, think now on the years to come
When you are old and I am gone
Will monuments like these be found
At edge of some far Persian town?