The rugged, steep, intrepid hills
wait expectantly for
the young innocent faces
of the soldiers
going ashore,
stepping on the sand
of an ancient land,
but a place not as old as
the one the lads came from.
Young men from an old land,
from a country just born,
seek to write some stories
to add to the growing collection
of a new mythology.
Their uniforms and packs are fresh
and unsullied by the sounds
and smells of war;
they are yet to be covered by the bloodied
red landscape
and the sweat and the vomit
that will exist close
in those noble pits
that must become
their graves.
“It’s an adventure lads!”
they announce in thoughts
and words,
full of light,
full of dark,
so soon to be drowned in the din
of weapons and
the surreal spectre of bodies
and still eyes that look
but do not see,
painted into the landscape,
painted into memory.
Their weapons are ready to fight
a war whose cause is known
and unknown;
and on this lonely Peninsula
they want to believe words
that echo from a long past
but seem now so new.
They are with their mates
as they splash through water and
tread the sand and climb
the beckoning cliffs
where nothing can go so wrong
that a friend and fellow traveller
is unable to fix by lending a hand
and showing the way.
Their eyes look up
with adventurous expectation
and wonderment about what is to come,
and their memories return to an old land
far away,
to friends and family
whose fears deepen with each absent day.
Then the guns rise from a force
whose origins are ancient
and from a people who have known travail
long before the new country
was a European possession.
The guns rise with the sun
and at sun down
Innocence has fallen,
and the great Gods of War
have thundered the awful tune
of death.
The long nights of doubt
and the longing for days long gone
have begun;
and with each other,
with the symphony and clatter
of eating out of cans,
syncopated with gunfire and shells,
life with exist
in the dreaded boundary between
courage and uncertainty.
22/4/2015
