Poem - Ray Searle

A Little Grey-Haired Mother

By Ray Searle

When other chaps are talking by the light

Of the campfire, of the girls they’ve left behind,

Some with golden, some with hair as black as night,

Each the prettiest and the sweetest of her kind,

I am thinking of a cottage in a little country town,

And a little grey-haired mother who is waiting for her own.

At night time when I cough upon the ground,

With no other roof above me but the sky,

Or with shells and shrapnel bursting all around,

In the trenches full of water I must lie.

Even then my thoughts like homing birds will fly across the sea,

Where a little grey-haired mother prays both day and night for me.