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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 32: THE HORSES
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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.

THE HORSES

My father bred great horses,
Chestnut, grey, and brown.
They grazed about the meadows,
And trampled into town.
They left the homely meadows
And trampled far away,
The great shining horses,
Chestnut, and brown, and grey.
Gone are the horses
That my father bred.
And who knows whither?...
Or whether starved or fed?...
Gone are the horses,
And my father’s dead.