Born in India where the sun glared
at the stoical English; his father’s lip
stiff under the huge moustache, knit
with grizzled whiskers over the stiff
gilding of his red coat’s collar; his mother,
haughty, decked in imperial silks,
her boned collar; the father’s hands
so massive, sinewed and scarred and no
soft lulling at the mother’s breast:
a Victorian childhood, steel grey.
Sent back home to England: for hard
study and games under threat of the birch,
the runs before breakfast, the cold baths:
to make a man of him.
And in his manhood
(before the Depression’s grime, old age
and death) unfit for the Great War, tall
in Edwardian grey, a slight physique;
and his pale, melancholy, liberal eyes
fade from the picture looked at two wars past
by his son, who has no children, and remembers.