TED
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| (Found here) |
When I was four or five.
Long afterwards I learned
He’d fought in the First World War.
Back then the only thing I cared about
Was the bar of chocolate that he brought me.
I thanked him,
Then ran off to bed.
He was dead
Before I’d even gone to school.
If there were picks and shovels
That could dig a tunnel down through time
To break out in that house again
And find those nights, I’d go –
To sit with him and ask
What he’d brought back, what he remembered,
Not like some bounty hunter after sparkling things
To shove in pockets, show off and sell,
But quiet, listening, hungering to understand
The truth of how it was out there,
To look through his old eyes and see
The shattered fragments of those years,
To piece together shard by shard
A little of the story that was his:
That place, that price.
~Kenneth Steven
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