Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 41: CHILDREN

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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.

CHILDREN

1. LITTLE ABEL GOES TO CHURCH

And this is what he heard

And saw at church:

Oh, a great yellow bird

Upon a perch—

Quite still upon a perch.

And then a man in white

Got up and walked to it,

And talked to it

For a long while (he said);

But the yellow bird

(Although it must have heard!)

Never turned its head,

Or did anything at all

But look straight at the wall!

(A true tale.)