VE Day – May we reap the grim lessons

Soon we’ll not be breathing

That air that is shared

Between times, the last century

And this, the war that started

It, that kicked it out of

History into a grey new world

Where valour was no longer

A red coat and sabre

But a tooth scattered

By a bomb,

Bored out of its

Brain by hours of waiting in

The blank spaces before the bomb

Ticks boxed in the souls,

Marked with a cross and tapped

Down in their millions,

Sretched out like wheat tops, ripe lives that

Will never be harvested.