TOO LATE NOW

Eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month.

And I think of you

Who I never knew.

Imagining, in grown-up years,

The smile, the stance, the smell of you.

Too late for all that now.

You, who fell in Vimy mud

And died, they said, through loss of blood,

But never found.

Then who's to say what made you stay

And on what bloody ground

Your weeping body lay.

I went to Arras,

Took flowers, brought my children,

To where they'd etched your name.

And in that silent cemetery

Of three thousand buried dead,

Thousands had no grave at all

Just names inscribed upon a wall.

Never found

In no-man's land.

Too late for all that now.

Too late for tears I would have shed

Too late to say the things unsaid

But on this day, in this eleventh hour,

I think of you.

And of all the things you missed,

All those faces left unkissed.

Too late for all that now. Lyn Waites