THE SOLDIER’S HOME
The soldier’s home!
Filling the house with khaki and brass buttons,
Coming in the dead of night
By the street light,
His boots banging on the roadway
Making the darkness jump.
We heard the mouth organ first,
Dancing its way through closed doors,
Skipping up the stairs
Tapping its melody on the scrubbed wooden floors
Until it was sure we had all woken.
Behind its music trickling into freezing rooms,
Covering the icy beds, making frosty pillows,
He came in, brown as a berry, burnt by foreign suns,
Calling for company and not very welcome.
War breaking out on every bedside,
Pulling covers away from frozen bodies,
Laughing, ‘Wakey! Wakey! Rise and shine.’
‘Give over. Stop it. Go away,’
Until a voice called crossly.
‘That will be quite enough. Stop teasing them
And all of you come down!’
Almost too much to ask
When the bitterly cold linoleum
Snapped off all our toes.
And so we woke into this icy frosted morning
Shouting joyfully into khaki and brass buttons,
Into heavy boots and the much loved face
Of almost a stranger,
Into the music of his mouth organ,
‘The Soldier is home! He is home!’
Poems by Gwen Grant 