Gallipoli

The boats left laden with men and streamers,and my son.And the people, great crowds that spilled down Queen Street onto the quay,held out tiny blue flags to the boats,as if the whole city wanted to grasp,just one more time,the fingertips of those who had already departed.Then letters came sailing back over that same thread of ocean,that all who remained behind feared would fray.

He wrote of Gallipoli,poetic names that leaped from my tongue.He wrote of fierce seas,fierce men, fierce disease,and the fiercer sun that flung its own bullets,claimed its own share.This was not your homeland,this was not your history.But the men persisted there,they wanted a chronicle they would rush up that hill,they would fly headlong into a myth.

And when the ships came home across the kneeling sea,he wasn’t one of the cheering men.And in their own way the crowds that came out were changed by the holes in the parade,the fallen confetti.But they persisted in their ardor,and made of my son a nation,and set him in stone where I can no longer mourn him.