Filed under: Poetry

Read Heather Glover's winning poem from our Poems for Peace competition for 11-18 year olds.

Between Waves



The nations lie awkwardly side by side:

A checkerboard in foreign countryside.

These hedgerows had their fragment of time. Now,

There’s a three-metre wide walking divide

Cuts up the forgive & unite & etcetera.

The German graves sink back, half veiled in leaves.

Sunlight like angel feathers falls across

Each stone alike, intimately. Each stone

Unlike the other, mostly: here, one’s mother

Emptied out her four-line summary of loss

On paper morphed by sea salt into stone.

Words like beloved. Only. Father, brother,

Son. Sometimes, where black ink bleeds

Or flesh in flashes reinvents itself

They drift known only to the Lord. Some names

Still echo, inert, across the sea

When poppies offer up the all-inclusive prayer-

Their names liveth forevermore. But God,

It seems, forgot those at the back,

Half veiled in leaves. A category alone

Floats unemotive on the unknown stones:

Ein deutscher Soldat.

This is where they drew the line between

Forgive and forget. Three metres of grass,

And language now a raft that floats on

Allied sea. These graves flagged up:

Three metres of grass and split

With speech, where silence ought to speak

Its transcendental peace.

In the reflective isolation of

A graveyard near Caen, the ranks of men

Forget themselves in soil; unruhig, unease,

Decay in unity. So now it’s true.

All stone is white. Bone, the whitest residue.

Heather Glover

17-18 years old

King Edward VI School, Stratford Upon-Avon