11 November 2018

A Poem for Armistice Day

This is my attempt at a poem in the voice of my grandfather, Jim Prendeville. He was born in 1888 in North Kerry and worked as a farm and bog labourer. He went to work in the Welsh mines and then enlisted in the British Army. He saw a lot of front line action and was wounded in 1917. When I was a boy he lived with us for a few years before his death and he told me lots of stories, including how he killed a German soldier at close quarters while on sentry duty. When he was taking off his shirt and going to bed at night, my brother and I would sometimes ask him to show us the big indentation in his upper back where the shell had hit him. He was born into poverty and worked hard to make a living. I believe he had some comfort and happiness with us in his final years.


Jim Prendeville

I was a tall man in the Lixnaw bog
Girls giggling
Across billy cans of tea

I was a tall man bent over
In the mines of the Rhondda
Coal was almost as mean as turf

I was a tall man the day I enlisted
Got a photograph done
A private standing like a captain

I was on my knees
The night that poor German lad
Ran onto my bayonet

I held my head up in Flanders
Eating plum duff from a tin
Christmas Day 1916

I was too fucking tall
The day the whizz bang nearly
Took the shoulder off me

I stood in the bog again
Much later
Never the same at all
 


1 comment:

  1. I think that is a great poem Tom. Really strange you should post it because my second assignment which I am typing out (but now side tracked! ) it's a research proposal about writing with an ipad and one if things I would like student participants to do is an I Poem. Try and get it published. So happy that your grandad was accepted by his family after coming home from the war. So many were not. All the best

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