My Anzac Day

War planes are flying over the town.

I hear them above the low cloud cover,

rumbling their way to the local park

to salute the Anzac Day celebration.

I am not at the Dawn Service.

'At the going down of the sun,' 

I might remember them – 'and 

in the morning,' but not at dawn.

I sleep sound – partly, no doubt

because men of my father's

and grandfathers' generations 

fought and didn't always return.

My Dad didn't dress up in his uniform

like the others, and march. That was because 

he couldn't, with his gammy leg

(acquired not in war but when he was 10).

It kept him from the front, too, 

but he went to Camp in Central Australia

(somewhere secret) – so I was just as much 

fatherless – training to repel invasion.

He used to lift me up on his shoulders

to watch our town's old diggers march:

his mates, eyes right, looking proud and smart.

I knew them as humble, kindly men.

In my passionate youth, I rejected

Anzac Day, that holy of holies,

as glorification of war – like so many

did at that time, from my generation.

We were Make love not war,

we were Give peace a chance.

But the fire and the noise of our views

for a time divided our nation.

And then, eventually, we all grew up.

After Vietnam, even our parents could see,

all wars dirty your hands. After East Timor, 

even I understood, some fights need to happen.

In recent years I went through a phase

of watching the big Sydney march

on the telly, feeling surprisingly sentimental

for all who survived and all who are gone.

This year, I won't. There's too much war 

in the world again. I'm meeting with other 

mothers and crones instead, to enquire, 
'How can we strengthen our light?' and begin.

Linking to The Tuesday Platform at 'imaginary garden with real toads' on day 25 of April Poetry Month.

Also linked to Protest and Outrage: Dark Poetry for the Cruellest Month, hosted by Magaly Guerrero.

Photo: Challenge by Agnes Lawrence Pelton (1940), shown here in accordance with Fair Use. This was posted with the prompt at 'imaginary garden'. Also it reminds me that the Australian AIF military badge during World War 2 was in the shape of a rising sun (which I believe I am not allowed to reproduce here for legal reasons).

War Years

Anzac Day 2011

My Dad never went to war.
Never had a hope.
Got run over by a cart at the age of ten,
spent years in bed, finally getting up
to walk lame, often with a stick,
always in pain, with a wound
that never healed, had to be re-dressed
daily — deep pink mercurochrome
painted on his white, exposed shin-bone.

He never went to war.
For Mum and me
he might as well have done,
sent away for months at a time
to a camp in Central Australia,
training for last-ditch invasion defence.
When he came home, I ran in fear
from his loud male voice, and didn’t understand
being banished from Mum’s bed.

He told me years later
that his best mate and next-door neighbour,
handsome Maurie Lightfoot,
was his Sergeant there. (What,
I wonder, was his disability? Maybe
eyesight; something invisible.)
Instead of ‘G’day Rob! How about a beer?’
it was, ‘Stand at attention, Private Robinson!’
Back home, they returned to normal.

Dad's workmate, Allan Beecroft,
that gentle, friendly man,
he went to the war. He was
a Rat of Tobruk. Afterwards
he spoke of it very seldom.
He respected Rommel, he said.
And he told one story, of a man
who ‘put up his arm’, never used it.
It wasted; he got sent home.

I remember ration books,
men in strange clothes (uniforms)
and the doll I loved and still have,
Julie with the rag-stuffed torso
and plaster hands, feet, head.
My Mum cried to have to give me
such a cheaply-made doll
but I had nothing to compare;
to me she was beautiful.

My Dad never went to war
but the war was all around us.
In the absence of men of fighting age,
women were surviving for themselves.
No-one’s life was untouched.
Our Foreign Minister is remembering now
on television, speaking from France;
and my husband, who never went to war,
listens with his shoulders shaking.

(Not part of the letter poems I've been doing this month; inspired by a friend's Anzac Day poem.)

Submitted, 8 June 2014, for Poet's United's Poetry Pantry #205