Dark Victory 11/11/18 Poem by John F. McCullagh

The Bells ring out great Peals of joy.
The war is won, Great Albion.
It merely cost a million dead,
a generation lost and done.

To you, fate tendered victory sweet,
to the Germans, a bitter peace.
There, fatherless boys, abed, asleep,
plot revenge for their deceased.

In the Wilfred Owen house;
no alloyed joy to meld with sorrow:
That day they learned their son had died
They'll dress the house in Black tomorrow.

His mother knew before word came,
she had a sense her son was gone.
That he'd be among the last to fall
for the glory of Great Albion

He fought almost unto the end,
dying in the war's last week.
When Mortal flesh and bullets meet
Poets are silenced when machine guns speak..

There is a pathos in his fate,
dying in the last week of war
Like the man who sailed the Ocean deep,
only to drown in sight of shore.







The poet Wilfred Owen, died in an attack on a German Machine gun nest on 11/04/1918, one week before the Germans sued for peace. His parents received word that their only son had died just as the Church bells were rung to celebrate the Armistice. Albion is a archaic name for Great Britain