Gallipoli Rosemary Maureen Clifford © The #ScribblyBark Poet
The shells burst all around he felt himself thrown to the ground in a shallow hollow, face down underneath a velvet sky. In khaki soaked and dusty, wet with blood – metallic, rusty. He was hanging on for grim death and he didn’t want to die.
As the battle roared and raged he quite expertly had gauged they weren’t making much progress. Johnny Turk had pinned them down. So in pain excruciating he lay bleeding, tired and waiting for John Simpson and his donkey and his last ride out of town.
He woke as dawn was breaking with the cold and shock now shaking his entire body, but his eyes could still see on the shore bodies coloured red and khaki. All were still – then like the larks he started singing in soprano. Eulogies for those no more.
He clutched a sprig of something, just a tiny twig of something which he stuffed into his pocket though he couldn’t tell you why. Two medics with a stretcher said “Just hang on mate we’ll getcha out of here as quick as lightning - you’ll be home soon, by and by.”
On that bloody field of battle where the deadly bullets rattled he had left a leg behind him that would be of use no more. Though he brought back to Australia little of his old regalia he still had that sprig of Rosemary plucked from that brutal shore.
Now old – he’s back in Sydney, near the bridge where as a kid he played and larked about with other mates who’d died upon that beach beneath those cliffs so fearsome. And on stormy nights he hears them as the thunder and the lightning bring them back within his reach .
There beside the front verandah in a spot that warms the sandstone, is a bush whose brimming blossom mimics periwinkle skies . He will forever hold them in his heart; mateship enfolds them when he picks Gallipoli rosemary, salt tears flow from in his eyes.
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