Rumours of War

 

 

First thing I remember - hills rolling to the border

I walked with my father through a childhood summer day

Following the stream – silent in our dreams

Lightspout held a rainbow in its spray

 

He wasn’t one for talking – never seemed to give full attention

As if his ears searched something far away

But he’d hold me when the path was steep –

Give me a smile, brush my cheek

Spoke more than any words he’d ever say

 

Only ten years before he’d scanned the coast of Normandy

Seen things he’d never choose to speak about again

How could his June skies ever after be unclouded

What echoed through the midsummer days for all those quiet men

 

Forty years later – a whispering hospital evening

I sat with my father counting out his last days

The waiting ships in lines stil clear in his mind

As dawn rose on Gold Beach to fill his gaze

 

Bridge:

First light on the water, the breeze across the heather

The sky above the stillness that stretches ‘cross the sea

The heat upon my face, the wind upon my back

The gentle hands of home that touched my father touching me

 

On these hills now my children run before me

And I watch for the clouds that darkened the skies my father saw

I’ve never hit that beach – he crossed it all his lifetime

I’m left here with his footprint on a burning angry shore

 

Always I’ll remember the day that’s fixed for ever

In a sudden instant thunder rolled up high

He shaded his eyes and stared - pinned against the air

All his focus hanging in the sky

 

Bridge2:

The sunlight on the water, the breeze across the heather

 The sky above the stillness that stretches ‘cross the sea

The heat upon my face, the wind upon my back

The slow hands of memory that touched my father touching me

 

My generation has lived, in this country at least, charmed lives. - How many generations before mine were packed off to war? Certainly my grandfather went to the trenches and my father in turn went to Normandy at the time of life when I was just finding my feet and embarking on a life of peace.

And yet, for me and my generation, the threat of the most terrible of wars crept quietly in to disturb our most reflective moments while the masters of war 'threw the worst fear that can ever be hurled'.

Meanwhile many of us grew apart from our parents in a way that probably no other generation has done as the gulf between their experience and our understanding of it grew almost unbridgeable.