Anzac Day Tribute

Apart  (Nov 1915)

She waits, in the brisk industry of a November day,

Keeping the home fires burning, serving the meals on-time;

She waits, on a Spring day, that has been made empty by his leaving.

He waits, in the biting chill of an Autumn Turkish dawn,

The insinuated warmth of a lit cigarette, his gun flinty and cold in his hand;

He waits, feeling her loss like a page torn from his thoughts of home.

Her jasmine blossom blows and falls like pink confetti,

Trails a lush perfume through the garden in the Spring afternoon.

Inside, the house is full of congenial chatter, of women sewing shirts for the war effort,

Of industrious knitting and purling of wool, for the hearts and the hands of their fighting men.

His denuded landscape hangs with morning mist at The Ridge,

All shattered dirt and frosted mud, dun earth, divested of all living things,

Men rising like spectres, or humped where they fell.

In a war of cold and hunger, heat and thirst, there is no time for burials;

Digging is a task so the living can hide.

A wireless hums in the dim parlour as she lifts her eyes

To a darkening sky under which he also waits somewhere;

She will be patient, she will not give him up;

Not while the night completes another day he has lived.

He gives himself up to Providence and fleet of foot, watching his sky

Made terrible by the bombardment, the flash and spark of bullet strikes, the snap of rifles;

There is no rest in the smothering dark when it’s raining lead and shrapnel.

Star-shells burst in the night sky, in the din of perpetual siege,

But his fear keeps him sharp, keeps him alive for another day.

By ambient light of the stove’s embers she knits by touch and memory,

His shape a pattern she can construct so easily.

He will wear this on his return, she tells herself, the yarn pulled tightly by her expectation,

The garment becoming the enduring proof of her belief,

And her faith, that by sheer will, she can keep him alive.

In the lining of his coat he keeps her image close in the left breast pocket,

Over his heart, to calm his quickening pulse when the whistle sounds.

He will see her again, and soon; that is his truth.

She waits in the bruising heartache of these endless days,

Lying on her side of the bed, rolling bandages at her kitchen table.

He waits under a coffin of sky, lying in damp trenches,

Hasty dug-outs, shallow pits and holes.

There is only waiting now, and expectation; of battles lost, and battles won.

There is only chance, and luck, and held breath, and waiting for his return.

                                                                        Angela J. Dawson