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Mike Jenkins - He Never Said

Edited by JODY PORTER

He Never Said
Mike Jenkins

He never once talked about it,
my Grandpa, so dumb
I believed he’d never been there:
mentioned a training camp,
some dunes in Lancashire.

I assumed his back
had stopped him, as it did
from him becoming a blacksmith
in the family tradition:
bent as a scythe
with a hunch like a stone sack
he had to carry for penance.

The Wesleyan lay preacher
who would always hurry us,
without explanation, past those beach
evangelists with their blurting placards
whose worship was ‘Songs of Praise’,
cleanliness and strict temperance.

He’d been there, my brother revealed,
like Whitman bearing stretchers
tending to the many wounded,
blown and blasted, defaced and limbless:
trying to halt the blood
like an earthen dam to a flood.

What he must’ve seen, never shared,
that kept him from the chapel
he was born into, where ministers declared –
‘Go and do your duty for King and God!’
What he couldn’t tell, such horrors
like pains he endured, jabbing bayonet-thrusts
of an unseen enemy inside his guts.

 

Mike Jenkins is an award-winning Welsh poet and author. He is widely published and is a founding editor of Red Poets. He has tutored at Ty Newydd, the National Writers' Centre for Wales and is known among Cardiff City football fans as the club's unofficial poet.

Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter.
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