“Read a story to the boys, they’ve been waiting all day for you, dear.”
“Too tired, too tired.” he said, “Not now” even though he knew that their boys were no longer there.
Three beds laid empty, though three gowns remained;
their belongings intact, their bodies blown apart where they had all three fought together, somewhere in Gallipoli.
Their mother found it too hard to go on without her beloved sons,
and took her tragic life, swallowed up by the muddy water in the billabong.
Their father, distraught now and all alone, without a single reason to carry on,
determined to find his beloved sons, having promised their mother
he’d bring them back home.
He knew the place where his sons had been shot,
he could feel that affinity there,
but the eldest, he’d heard, was alive, though a prisoner of the Turks now,
somewhere across the sea from Gallipoli.
The woman said the coffee grounds told of his plight,
at the hotel where he‘d stayed each and every night,
but still he knew not where his son could be found,
though he’d searched every inch of Turkish ground.
He befriended a captain in the Turkish army,
both attempting to escape rebel forces,
and reciprocating and gaining each others’ respect,
succeeded in escaping on the enemy’s horses.
Dodging stray bullets they arrived at the place,
where his heart told him his son would be found.
A very old man said he would be in the church,
and there father and son reunited in fond embrace.
To escape was their only hope of ever returning home,
so they leapt into the fast flowing river and floated along,
to arrive at the place from which he’d first set out,
the old hotel in Istanbul.
And she was still there, she served them coffee,
glad he’d returned once again.
She had known he would find his injured son.
She had seen it all in the coffee grains.
© Val J Chapman
April 2015
