By Suvla’s Waves

Sam and Jack and Rupert Brooke


You might have died with Rupert Brooke,

but septicemia took him off

two days before the V-beach madness

that did for both of you ; you occupy

some corner of a foreign field

that is for ever Ireland.

 

B45 and 46

they call them,

tiny plots of dead earth,

lonely graves by Suvla’s waves,

land that shelters wasted Irish bones.

 

Brian Dodds

 


My uncle Jim Malligan still lives in Cowan Street, where he was born.

He’s a grandson of the J. Mallaghan at 50 Stream Street, of the 1909 list.

That man’s four sons went off to World War 1, all having been in the army before that madness started.   My poem is a tribute to two of my own who perished needlessly.

Jim is now in his 80s and lives on his own, just a couple of hundred yards away from Stream Street.

Small world, indeed.
 

The horror of war still goes on, despite that dreadful ‘war to end all wars!’

 

 

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