Old women; shuffling and tapping, hunched and weary, heads down,
stumping stolidly their bow legged and woolly stockinged spastic gaits.
Crumpled chicken wing legs and cream puff ankles over putty coloured shoes
spur on their lame and stiff legged aluminium steeds;
Lucent tissue paper hands tremble in worn out purses,
searching amongst the bus tickets and the hair pins;
For coppers; for the remaining small change of their lives.

Bright, gimlet eyes in crumpled liver spot faces,
peering at the world through national health specs
propped on florid, bulbous strawberry pipped noses.
Bright tufts of silver couch grass on puckered sand dune chins
smile at blue rinses under rubbed and bagpussed woollen hats.

Do these women, these spent and wrinkled memories of women,
Ever speak of those bomb scattered days and pyrotechnic incendiary nights;
Of the candle lit terrors of dank and damply corrugated Anderson coffins?
Or of picking amongst the debris of their homes, their lives, their spirits,
for the bodies; The torn and bloody remains of their shattered children?
Do they give voice, ever, to the endless nights of fear and empty bellies,
the screaming, trembling, sweat damped tension of the munitions factory;
Of fulminate fuses, bright brass keys to oblivion, only ever a tremble away?
What is their story... Is it worth the telling?

Old men: stooped and crack kneed, mumbling and wheezing,
their sticks aclatter as fragile marionette wooden limbs.
Frail, in bag pocketed unkempt sports jackets and ragged sweat stained caps
watching a mistrusted world from the corner of a bloodshot and watery eye;
Finger stained flyes in cinder holed and razor creased crimplene trousers,
flapping, loose, spinnaker sails tacking their heel worn shoes into the wind;
Laces and toes diamond bright from a thousand old habit polishings.

Bony fingers with nicotine stained nails clatter in trouser pockets,
stirring the coins and clutter and sea shells of unreliable memories
Singing; Melodic and metallic; their song falling now on failing ears.
Deflated balloon necks under jutting blue chins, scraped to the bone
By thirty thousand wet razor shaves in their lives’ steam run mirror.

Do these men ever speak of long nights in the screaming, sound filled black,
cramped and freezing in the bullet spat, flak torn guts of the bombers;
As they danced their dance of death in the sizzling fire woven lace of the spotlights?
Or the panic in a stranger’s eyes as he twitched and grunted, spitting blood,
dying loud and ghastly and grisly; belly full of their unyielding bayonet?
Will they ever share the filth and the terror and the disease and the starvation,
the broken bodies of their mates that line each and every gore soaked yard;
each blood bought, soul crushing and twice cursed inch of the Burma railway?
What is their story... Is it worth the remembering?

Broke backed and year weary and spent what terrors now, what fears
does the night bring; do they fear the passing of the light or beg for the dark?
What now? What now for the invisible old and their invisible lives?
Does the reaper ride their backs, clinging, merciless, to that faded cloth?
The loose folds of faded coats two sizes too big, in long out of date fashions;
Skeletal fingers entwined, cruel, unforgiving in that threadbare tartan bridle?
Or does he walk with them, beside and close, gentle as a welcome friend?
Carrying the travel scarred bags of their being; the trinkets of bare remembered days;
Shouldering the last minute shopping of their lives to the last bus home...
This was their story... Are we worthy of its telling?

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