A TOUGH TOY RABBIT
Quarrelled over by five kids
An upright grey shape
Worn down to deformity
With stumps instead of feet
Bruggsey was a gift from a Dad gone to prison
News, newspapers a constant threat
Noises at night shook the bed
Kissed goodbye many times
Postage stamps scorned
Mam proudly showed us the headlines
Busy wiping steam from painted walls
The kettle always on the boil
We ate warm jam butties
On the cold walk to school
earless Bruggsey left behind in a blanket
One by one we left for jobs a ways from home
Foreign welcomes on our tongues
Slow to hear of those who were gone
From a country with no flag we owned
Bruggsey’s remains buried in the rich dark soil
ENDIDO NAZI FACISTE – 1944
High
under the sun of Tuscany
lupins are in bloom
yellow heather poppies
grown for catching frogs
Trucks
are heard but in the distance
summer hills are dreaming
sweet peas unfurl their pods
for bees to visit them
How
can they come up the hill to kill then?
Fields are soft
doves sound out a blessing
young girls walk to the church
Ave Maria
echoes in thin uncertain singing
there’s to be a wedding
quick before the army comes
for unbowed peasant ones
Bodies
heaped on the road have to be buried
fathers lovers brothers sons
all the men
shot dead
Jesus Mary and Joseph
forgive them and they did
twenty, thirty, forty
fifty years later a marker
Ave Maria
singing is heard in the church
soprano voices
high in the hills of Tuscany
there’s to be a wedding
Eliza Wyatt is an award winning playwright and has written one novel, Annabel Langoni. Her poems have been set to music by Paul Ch
Flight of the dragonfly 