Gas

[Ian Adrian Millar]

GAS

How quietly he cleared the sandbags,
Along the fire step came creeping,
Sliding along the duckboards,
Into the very mugmire seeping.

He was Death, him, who choaked the sentry,
And stole past behind his vail of green,
It was he who blanketed three sleeping lads,
And suffocated them mid-dream.

Death came in that tranquil mist,
Like an algae fog from the Hebrides,
And touched here, and touched there,
And fled like a thief on the freshening breeze.

Ian Adrian Millar

For Davie Clarkson and others at Linburn, the Scottish National Institution for War Blinded.

[Des Taff Jenkins]

Hi Ian.
My Grandfather died early in the twenties from the later effects of gas poisoning in the first war, I used to wear his old gas cape to school back in the thirties.
Des

[Keith at Tregenna]

Poignant.

K.