brothers – Jovis on a Journey…

Going down the stairs on that March Saturday afternoon
I looked out of the landing window at the torrential rain
It was then that I heard a loud hollow thump as he fell
And I was never to see my father alive again.

I was just a little shy of my thirteenth birthday
It was the unhappiest and saddest of my days
My mother now a widow had lost her best friend
And the pain that followed hurt in many ways.

Five brothers and our sister had lost a rudder
To the ship that is a family going through life
And the empty place not filled beside the table
Strikes at the heart as with a rusty knife.

Time passes and my brothers number just one
And my sister makes us three and not now six
For over four decades and five my kin have fallen
And that’s one statistic nothing can ever fix.

Never fail to love the ones you care for
Never fail to tell them how much you care
For sometimes if you turn around for too long
You turn your head and they’re no longer there.

©Joe Wilson – Family down 2014

He still felt deafened by the terrible sound
From the huge field guns that both sides had
Been firing hour after hour for four days. You
Could be scared to death just from the noise.

An eighth didn’t seem like much
Two sixteenths
Four thirty-seconds
Eight sixty-fourths
Sixteen one hundred and twenty-eighths.

Following his recent promotion to Colonel
He was sitting in his new office at his new desk
Hesitating to put his pen to paper
Resisting the inevitable sorrow to come.

He was writing down the numbers – thinking
Thirty two two hundred and fifty-sixths
Sixty four five hundred and twelfths.
Now the numbers looked much bigger.
When he reached
Five hundred and twelve as a
fraction of four thousand and ninety-six
He stopped.

The number now seemed insurmountable
Yet it was still that small fraction.
But he now had to write to that number
Of wives, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters
And tell them that their boy would
Never again walk through their front door.

An eighth is so much more than just a fraction.

One of a group of poems recognising the centenary of WW1