world war 2 – Sarah Drury

My Great Grandmother suffered from mental illness after seeing both her boyfriend and her husband killed in tragic circumstances. She had a breakdown during world war II and thought the Germans would come and steal her daughter (my grandmother). As a result she was taken into an asylum for many years and my grandmother was shunted from pillar to post. Here’s a tribute…

Hitler

I thought
I heard
The Germans
Advancing
Upon
My doorstep

I cower
Eyes peeled
For an
Aryan invasion

Blonde child
Running wild
They’ll
snatch her away
I say

Terrors drip off
My fearful tongue
Stagnant puddles
Of hysteria
Seep into
The cracks
Of my
Disintegration
Psychological
Photosynthesis

No wonder the
Psychosis
Paints a Jackson Pollock
Within my
Fucked up mind
Red the colour
Of dead
My hands I wring
And snap necks
Enemies falling
Like pigeon shit

And Hitler
Can
Kiss my
English ass.

A tribute to my grandfather..

Brave

Old gnarled hands
Lifetime etched between two palms
Hands that served a nation
Praising life, not singing psalms
Two hands that fought a war
That fought in peace when death was calm.

Never forgetting your working class roots
Never afraid of dirty hands
Or the perspiration that came with graft
or the wars you fought in foreign lands.
Never denying you came
From an era when men were the powerful ocean
And women were the shifting sands.

Toil upon soil, your hands spoiled
Hops in Kent, corpses in the fields of France
Never failing, never curtailing
Life a canvas, sometimes bloody, you took your chance.
You never knew what was coming,
But you knew that death comes in advance.

Old gnarled hands
Lifetime etched between two palms
Hands that served a nation
Praising life, not singing psalms.

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