Wadham College
Chapel
Oxford
Pain fills the
roar of the organ, and all the young wills are bowing
low in fear and
ache to realms that we know not of.
Candles flicker in
darkness like daffodils cold is cowing,
a hymn rises up to
the roof praising God who is perfect love.
Then from a
pale-red star the storm of the Lord starts descending,
though one last
breaker still rolls of the organ’s delightful roar;
the chaplain lifts
up his voice, his white distant words upwards wending:
“Let us remember
the dead, the fallen who’ve gone before” ...
An unending grief
of names foredoomed to blood, tears and weeping,
smiling young
names his voice brings alive to us one by one,
friends who toiled
on the river, blue-bladed oars clean-sweeping,
while poplars
lining the Cherwell quivered till autumn was gone!
Iron and horrors
and cold in pointlessness and in battle,
that was your lot
and that too the prime of your youth swiftly stole.
Bullets that
whistled past ears and bodies that cramps made rattle,
corpses that
rotted – the soul though? friends, what became of your souls?
A brother of yours
I recall, who cherished a dream never-ending:
to smoke a while
of an evening over a white-painted gate ...
He came home to
his longing, though his heart pain always was rending:
that you could not
be there as well, on summer’s eves languid and late.
But God who is
perfect love and gave him that dream for his keeping,
remembers you
every one, brothers of hardship and need.
He roams in the
upper air, along stars’ white highways sweeping,
ensuring that all
get to live – before death’s hour all must heed.
We kneel in the
organ’s roar for dead, unknown friends departed,
young tortured
souls who sank into that great rest while we grieve.
Are they alive
beyond death, in a land to know we’ve not started?
Dear God, if my
faith can help, then shall my heart believe.
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