The Ramblings of an Over-Active Mind

Do you remember the soldiers now?

"Do you remember the soldiers now?" is take from my second book "Without a Dream." It's a poem Stephen Bannister reads aloud during his midnight radio shows or before going down the hill on leave. It invokes questions about how we treat our veterans and our allegiance to their world.

Not every soldier is born a soldier

When they fight to free the world,

Soldiers, sailors and airmen protect us

Beneath flags freely unfurled,

Police, fire and medics fight

To preserve peace and life,

And Johnny's mother Jenny is sat at home,

She is the soldier's wife.

Research will fight against cancer,

Met knowledge predicts the storms,

Politicians fight for a better world

Where humanity sits forlorn,

Religion plays its part too but

Causes more wars than it fights.

Johnny's a soldier, a sailor, and an airman

His plight keeps Jenny awake at night.

The soldiers, let's call them all soldiers,

Our first line of belief in all wars

They fight so we can live our lives and be free,

They fight in the heat and the thaw

They fight to rid the man's cancers

The jealous, the bigot, despotic insanity.

While back at home young Des Evans

Is fighting Armageddon on his PS3.

And when war is over do you remember?

Our young men and women who'll never come home

Asleep forever under sods that are sandy

In their caskets and our memories.

In the inferno of blood, guts and thunder

They fought when the going got rough,

Morals and ethics gone out of the window

Limbs lost or falling off.

Do your remember the soldiers when you're out shopping,

When you protest and march for your rights at town hall

Do you ignore the servicepersons charities when

You drape our cenotaphs with colours that mean nothing at all

Do your remember the soldiers when, you're

Drunk as a skunk in your bed.

When you read the news the next morning

Your soldier mate's been shot in the head?

Remember the days in April and November

When nations stop to grieve

For all the soldiers who have not come home,

Lying in graves six-feet deep.

Remember the regiment of headstones,

Royal Wooton Bassett's unflinching resolve,

Do you remember the soldiers now?

Do you understand what it involves?

Last Post calls us to stop what we're doing

To remember the Johnnies on the frontline,

At sea, in the air.

We also remember the Jennies who are showing

To the whole human nation just what it means to care.

At the setting of the sun don't forget who we are

Who we were and what we've become

We are your family's soldiers,

Reveille in the rising sun.

Rhiw Sider