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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 3: CLOUD MESSENGERS
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About This Book

A collection of short poems written by a soldier in captivity reflecting on home, memory, and the experience of imprisonment. The verse moves between intimate domestic images—mother, English gardens, county landscapes—and the hardships of internment, loneliness, and comradeship, often blending pastoral detail with wartime grief and wry humor. Forms vary from ballades and sonnets to rondel and villanelle, and recurring motifs include nature, loss, longing, and reflections on duty and sacrifice. Many pieces juxtapose the small joys of remembered rural life with the starkness of prison, producing restrained lyricism that balances tenderness, anger, and quiet faith.

GLOUCESTERSHIRE
FRIENDS

CLOUD MESSENGERS

You clouds that with the wind your warden
Flying toward the Channel go,
Or ever the frost your fruit shall harden
To hail and sleet and driving snow,
Go seek one sunny old sweet garden—
An English garden that I know.
Therein perchance my Mother, straying
Among her dahlias, shall see
Your rainy gems in sunlight swaying
On flower of gold and emerald tree.
Then in her heart feel suddenly
Old love and laughter, like sunshine playing
Through tears of memory.