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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 33: MOTHER AND SON
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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.

MOTHER AND SON

“Bow-wow! Bow-wow!” See how he bounds and prances,
Wow!” races off, returns again and dances—
A little wave of sunshine and brown fur—
About his old rheumatic mother-cur.
Look how she gives him back his baby bite
Tenderly as a human mother might.
Now, poor old thing—she gazes quaintly up
To laugh dog-fashion at me. “What a pup,
Master!” she seems to say: then, like a wave,
He’s down on her again—“Oh, master, see,
I’m growing old.... What spirits youngsters have!”
Her old eyes blink as they look up at me.