LESSONS FOR LIFE

This poem is now as old as some of the pupils who will stand in The Garth at Repton School this year for the Act of Remembrance. Watching them every year as some shivered in the cold, held the silence and intoned the words dutifully, it was impossible not to be reminded of earlier generations, their names engraved on the roll of the fallen, listed on house boards or caught forever in ancient photographs, who had filed into the same chapel to hear lists of their departed fellows and forebears read out by the Headmaster every week.

Lessons for Life

Ranks of pinched white faces

Packed around the Garth:

Uniforms, creases, crests,

Leather stiffly gleaming.

Lines of children, really,

Graven in the cold;

Unmarked but not unmoved,

Learning silence,

 

Waiting patiently for

Each note, weighed

On the brittle light.

The silver bugle cracks,

Like biting down on shot,

The boy run short of breath.

Then the wreathing step

And dying words,

 

Hushing trickling birdsong,

Setting fast in air.

The shedding scarlet acer

Slips its annual trace;

Each leaf listing, right,

Left, lowered slowly down,

Ghostly, self-effacing

On hard flags.

                                                                                                John Golding, November 2013