Hill 60.

( For my mother, and in memory
of Harry Ditchfield 1883-1915.)


I am afraid I have no wars,
Only thoughts of how it might have been.
My grandfather died at the age of thirty-two,
Shot through the head by a sniper's bullet
In a cold and dirty trench at Hill 60.
His thoughts, his future, his aspirations, his love,
All died in foreign mud, before even I was conceived.
Now he sleeps in a Belgium churchyard,
In the little village of Loker, near Kemmel.
We have the one and only photograph of him,
Held together with sellotape and fading at the edges;
On his brow, a kiss still lingers,
From a daughter who, I think, has suffered by his absence.
We even have a photograph of his grave,
And in the desk draw, in my mothers home,
There lie the tattered remnants of his last letter,
Written in pencil, written in the trenches,
As shells exploded all about him, and bullets
Whistled over-head, and songbirds wept
In the severed limbs of dead trees.
"Goodbye Harry," a friend at home had said. "Good luck."
"I shan't return," he replied, "I shan't be coming home."
In the noise of war that filled men’s ears with dread,
And in smoke that made them blind, he wrote:
"...and give my love to my little girl."