Posted with reverence, awe and respect... and, as it were, with confusion and pain. K xx

MOTHER LOVE

A dying baby is cradled in strong arms. Hot tears wash caked-on sweat and blood from his deeply-furrowed brow and silvered lights are smoothed tenderly from his filthy tousled hair, replenishing its auburn youth. “Kiss me, Mummy” the last gasp wrung from parched, cracked lips, as if spoken through the raw ooze of his brutal blown-off side…

…“And this, Ma’am, is how your husband died, lying there in my arms, thinking I was you” is how the soldier later wrote home to his bereaved wife, “’Kiss me, Honey’ his final breath”.

The young widow wished she could cuddle this boy, the one who had succoured her husband on his battlefield deathbed. “In war”, she thought, “we are all mothers and all sons.”

She walked to the swing in the high pine, the one where they played together as neighbouring children; the one where they later sat and kissed; the place where they had become engaged. Back then their earth seemed always to be bathed in a maternal peace that embraced their future warmly. She lay face down in the lush green grass, weeping her prayer that Mother would love her and take her life too; that family might be together again.

In a distant battle zone, the soldier lay down with her.