Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 45: THE WIND IN TOWN TREES

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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 WIND IN TOWN TREES

What is it says the breeze

In London streets to-day

Unto the troubled trees

Whose shadows strew the way,

Whose leaves are all a-flutter?

“You are wild!” the rascal cries.

The green tree beats its wings

And fills the air with sighs.

“Wild! Wild!” the rascal sings.

“But your feet are in the gutter!”

Men pass beneath the trees

Walking the pavement grey,

They hear the whisperings tease

And at the word he utters

Their hearts are green and gay.

Then like the gay, green trees,

They beat proud wings to fly,

But, like the fluttering trees,

Their footprints mark the gutters

Until the beggars die.