my friend Cira sent me this. so its for all the mums ...

Another day has come and gone,
I need a reason to go on,
Tell me that you' re coming home
Tell me that you're not alone

Tell me son, that you're happy,son
marching in your greens
Don't you miss being home,
lounging in your jeans?

I shake myself, and to God I pray,
that you make it thru, another day
It s so hard to watch your baby grow,
I worry , that you're in danger
But to God and his angels, your mum prays,
to them, you are no stranger.

I' m a soldiers mum, and I'm doing fine
You've taught me to be brave
Just sometimes, my boy , my precious son,
the fear comes in a wave.

I m sorry, that you heard me cry,
I never got to explain,
I stubbed my toe, really hard and was crying from pain.
A soldiers mum almost never cries,

I am so proud of you, my wonderful son
And, a tear in my eye, you 'll never see,
You' ve made me strong, you;ve make me proud
As proud as a mum can be

Forgive me, my baby,
That day I sounded bad,
My back, it probably hurt
Because my son you know, my son, my world
You have never made me sad.

A soldiers Mum, I am,
A soldiers Mum, I'll be
Until the day, my baby boy
Comes marching home to me.

aussiewife...

quit making me cry...
every time I read your stuff...
I sob....

oooh I hate sobbing near a flat monitor screen....

ARKie....:)

Oh don't cry Arkie

I am happy for my son, so proud of him. He's home safe now as they are pushing him through RMC. He's also got a wonderful young woman who adores him and she just became on Wednesday night my sons fiancee, its funny but its different from when she was just my DD friend for years! <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />
They fit. Wonderful.
Ok I cried when I got it too <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/crazy.gif" alt="" /> and when he came home wednesday & when they told me the fantastic news <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Now if only my DD's Husband to be and MY H get home safe then all is ok. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/crazy.gif" alt="" />

Raiders' Dawn

Softly the civilized
Centuries fall,
Paper on paper,
Peter on Paul.


And lovers walking
From the night -
Eternity’s masters,
Slaves of Time -
Recognize only
The drifting white
Fall of small faces
In pits of lime.


Blue necklace left
On a charred chair
Tells that Beauty
Was startled there.
Ended. Gone.
Raiders dawn.

I am proud of yours as well..

and fearful for my young ones....
and all that stuff that goes along with it...

prayers of safety to all of them...

ARK

My DD is singing this in the Army Concert, its very beautiful

The Soft Goodbye

when the light begins to fade
and shadows fall across the sea,
one bright star in the evening sky.
your love's light leads me on my way.

there's a dream that will not sleep,
a burning hope that will not die.
so you must go now with the wind,
and leave me waiting on the tide.

time to fly, time to touch the sky.
one voice alone, a haunting cry.
one song, one star burning bright,
may it carry me through darkest night.

rain comes over the gray hills,
and on the air, a soft goodbye.
hear the song that I sing to you
when the time has come to fly.

when you leave and take the wind
and find the land that faith will bring,
the brightest star in the evening sky
is yours to find for me.

is yours to find for me.

Sailing Home from Rapallo
by Robert Lowell

[February 1954]


Your nurse could only speak Italian,
but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week,
and tears ran down my cheeks....


When I embarked from Italy with my Mother’s body,
the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova
was breaking into fiery flower.
The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds
blasting like jack-hammers across
the spumante-bubbling wake of our liner,
recalled the clashing colors of my Ford.
Mother traveled first-class in the hold;
her Risorgimento black and gold casket
was like Napoleon’s at the Invalides....


While the passengers were tanning
on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs,
our family cemetery in Dunbarton
lay under the White Mountains
in the sub-zero weather.
The graveyard’s soil was changing to stone—
so many of its deaths had been midwinter.
Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrifts,
its black brook and fir trunks were as smooth as masts.
A fence of iron spear-hafts
black-bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates.
The only “unhistoric” soul to come here
was Father, now buried beneath his recent
unweathered pink-veined slice of marble.
Even the Latin of his Lowell motto:
Occasionem cognosce,
seemed too businesslike and pushing here,
where the burning cold illuminated
the hewn inscriptions of Mother’s relatives:
twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks.
Frost had given their names a diamond edge....


In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin,
Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL.
The corpse
was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.

Preludes
by T. S. Eliot (Thomas Stearns Eliot)


I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.


And then the lighting of the lamps.


II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.


III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.


IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.


I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.


Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

and one more... I love poetry too. Hi AW! Its me, smur

My Country by Dorothea Mackellar

The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies
I know, but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of rugged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me!

The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops,
And ferns the warm dark soil.
Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.
Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold.
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze…
An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand
though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

Hi smur!! where have you been? whats the go? email me & let me know!

My DH just loves that Dorothea Mackellar poem! <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

The kids of so many deployed service families are having great trouble coping with their fears, its a hidden price so many kids are paying. We try to get them to talk and write about it as our support psychologist's tell us its far better to do so and with the older ones to NEVER lie and tell them its all going to be ok. We tell them its very likely all will be ok, but don't make promises we can't keep, it destroys their feelings of safety and trust. One 16 yr old read this out loud ........

I was a Soldier
Do not stand on my grave and weep...
I am not there. I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn's rain.

When you awaken in the morning's hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft starshine at night.

I was a Soldier
Do not stand at my grave and cry...
I am not there. I did not die.

It made me appreciate the reality my own daughter has lived with for so long. These kids are pretty wonderful.