Leaving

 

I don’t doubt,

I don’t doubt at all that

Atrocities are carried out by

All who claim to know,

For they feed it –

To each and every-one – still,

When you see the big picture,

The real story behind the gore,

You’ll not want for war,

You’ll not want the macabre images

Hollywood cries for,

 

I saw once upon many moons ago,

The real plight of victims;

Children starving,

Grown men crying

Owning only what they wore,

And women fresh from labour

Who could hardly walk

Amongst the bombs and missiles,

 

This is the price we pay,

This is the carnage

We play the last post,

We’re fighting for human rights

In a country that forsakes

The rights of the child,

The rights of women,

     And when the men return

Haggard,

We can only admire

The strength they have

For the job ‘we’ just could not do!

 

He was a fusilier,

He was a soldier,

He has his coffin draped

In the union flag like

Many who’ve fought before,

His death means so much,

So much for it brought the truth

Of it all to the homestead

We call our own,

Yet,

     Only will it be the home

We once had,

When all communities

Recognise the sacrifice ‘they’ make,

 

Despite the politics raging,

We’re fighting for the honour

Of a foreign land,

Despite our own

Indiscretions upon this soil,

We’re battling to introduce

A world owning nothing but poverty,

Despite the death

Of a drummer from the poorest estates

Of Britain,

     We must carry on

And not leave behind

The burkha or Koran stained with blood,

     And though we know,

     We feel that religion is failing

All of mankind,

We have to acknowledge

The rights of the woman and child.

 

Lee’s untimely death

At the hands of fanatics,

Fuels only imaginations

Bordering barbaric,

And if the barbaric does win

For our twenty-first century child,

Then we all may as well be

At year zero,

 

A drummer,

A soldier,

A man and a dad,

But more than that,

He stood for the rights

Of a country at loss,

And though we all know

War be a foe of humanities kind,

Only the blind will treasure his death,

Blind of heart,

Blind of faith

Blind be the person

Who scoffs at his kill,

     For a man is not muslim,

A man is not Christian,

Man is not man if he only condemns

 

We sit here in Britain

We cry at the war,

We cry each individual

Sent home under a flag,

We know it’s a sacrifice

That we struggle to bear,

Yet we know

We cannot leave our

Fellow human behind,

His future is gone

But his child will always

Carry dad in his eyes,

But more than this,

On leaving this world,

He played for the future

Of many a man woman and child.

 

Michael J Waite 26^th May 2013.