Dear all,

I offer this as a form of prayer.

Indeed it is really for Simon. I wanted to offer a prayer but did not know how exactly. I just wanted him to know that many people appreciate his unstinting and unswerving efforts for peace.

God bless you Simon.

Make of it what you will, it is all true, though I joined the dots myself obviously.

For Simon......


@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

'I see a shoe.

There is still an ankle in it.

It is the ankle of a child.

A war breezed through here,

so many years ago.

The war is gone yet the war still remains.

They are a strange people.

They have nothing.

Yet they smile; half of them on crutches, half with one eye, or one ear, or one hand.

They scratch the ground like a pecking bird, for a seed perhaps or a grub not yet noticed'.......



.......There is a Churchyard in the deeps of Wales.

Set among the rookeries and long within the bay where the raspy breath of the Irish Sea reminds one only vaguely of the world beyond.

In the long forgotten graveyard of tombs almost worn to dust, a gleam of fresh stone dressed with failed flowers stands proud.

And whispers to come closer,

to see Who I Am.

Who are you?

The squabbling rooks grow quiet, the moment is frozen while the crash of waves on rock seems also to fade for some small while.

There is a quiet tension.

There is a song to be heard.

I am listening - Who, then, Are You?......


'....Steel. Blood. Explosions so loud that my ears are burst. I do not understand why I am here. I had a love you know. So far away now. The wind, the rain, the cannon shells rip the air and then I am drowning, diving for dear life.

I never knew the sea so deep. I never knew that beneath the boiling waves stood such a realm so, so different to mine. So very dark and and so very deep.

I drowned then.

The sea sank beneath me then.

I was lifted by her arms; she returned me to the waves, the wash, the shore and then the land.

My story is over.

Why are you still here?.....'


.....A sudden chill caught me tightening my coats. The wind whipped, the rooks renewed their raucous bickerings.

And then I knew that I did not belong here among the fields of the dead. I was no longer welcome.

I brushed aside a withered flower and revealed the polished stone, still kept by some strange agency.

It read:

'To a Sailor. Killed in the Great War. Known only unto God'.

As I fled the but one stone in that forgotten necropolis, a madness overtook me, and I screamed at the air in defiance and despair.

That we tended the dead such, but held no regard for those yet living.

That someone, somewhere, would tend a rotten cadaver given up by the jealous sea.

Year in and year out, after each and every damned decade without knowing or caring whose bones that lay there forever buried, they tended that lonely stone.

It mattered not to them, those that tended that stone, who was this child that lay there in the oh so cold earth by the sea, whether they knew them or no.

It mattered only to the unseen hand, that the memory beneath the earth should not lie there alone, afraid, uncared for...

...Somewhere, far across the sundered seas of land and time, lived a man and a woman once upon a while.

They were a simple people that worked hard and loved well.

They never knew what became of their child, sent to a war they did not understand.

They too tended a grave in their hearts, thought their hearts were long since ruined.

Nobody tended their grave.

I stood on the cliff, high above Oxwich bay, and beheld one last time the crumbling church, the testy rooks and the lonely, cared for grave.

The stone did not speak. It stared at me blankly while I asked myself why?




'.....Jambo Jambo!'

Mercy grabbed my hand as he spotted me, scrabbling over the dust with his forearms.

He had no legs, they had been ripped apart on a long forgotten mine in a war no-one remembered while he played with his brothers in a field.

The convoy had arrived, today they would eat.

I raised him up in my arms so that he could see the sacks of maize being unloaded, the dust from the convoy still thick in the air, the crowds hectoring the soldiers for food now, not later.

His eyes gleamed.

This forgotten, small soldier, heavy in my arms, chattered excitedly about everything and nothing. How he was happy that his small sister would not cry today. How his mother would smile for the first time in many months.

There was a war here, a long long time ago.

Nobody remembers why.




yechydda,