Carry On Sir Tom - Diane Scantlebury

Captain Sir Tom Moore,
A hundred years was never enough,
Inspiration of a nation
Till Covid cruelly took you with its wrath,
Although none of us will last forever
It only needs a selfless few,
To set an example and lift our spirits
Show us what we ought to do,

Captain Sir Tom Moore,
Achieved so much in his 100th year,
Set the bar of hope high for others
So they’d meet life challenges without fear,
National hero, national treasure,
Accolades well deserved and won,
Your influence transcended generations
Sir Tom, your legacy will carry on.

Diane Scantlebury

Image : BBC

Operation Mincemeat - Stephen A. Roberts

Do you remember
The man who never was
An unnamed corpse
Turned volunteer for the cause

She met him on the subway
Sweetly they held hands
Before his final journey
To foreign lands

A considerate lover
A special friend
She imagined a different life
But it had to end

Floating in a foreign sea
He became alive
And by his dead embassy
Helped to fool the other side

Stephen A. Roberts

Image: Wikipedia

NHS - Richard Fleming

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning …

The ward is a war-zone, a battlefield
where daily dies our confidence,
our grounds for hope, our energy.
Each start of shift, we rise to face
an enemy whose strength exceeds
our fearful expectations.
Poorly equipped, still we advance,
driven by our integrity,
while, on all sides, the dying plunge
downward through a corrupted sea,
their last breaths greenly frothing out
from choked throats as they spiral down.

Our masters moralise and watch,
hand-wringing as the casualties
increase in numbers day by day.
Spruce Generals, they spend hours with charts
while we must soldier on each day.
To those who fill the wards, the sick,
for whom there is scant hope, we fight,
but these are not good deaths, instead
men thrash in panic towards the end
as a green sea invades their lungs.
We do our utmost, still they die,
the old, the hardly old, the young.

Through night-shift trenches, barbed-wire days,
we grimly trudge, barely awake,
round-shouldered, prematurely old,
towards our shift-end scrubbing-down,
a brief respite and restless rest.
The virus takes no prisoners
and those it spares are subtly changed:
their swagger gone, they rise each day
aware of their fragility
while, night and morning, we return,
dog-tired, to grapple with our fear
because there are no conscripts here.

Richard Fleming