February 2019
Author's Note: The last great cavalry charge was made by the 4th Australian Light Horse at Beersheba in 1917 . My father was only 4 then, but the glamour of the Light Horse remained between the wars and as a young man he joined the Light Horse as part of the Citizens Military Force. When WW II broke out he volunteered for the RAAF and was seconded to the RAF, where he served in 179 Squadron of the Coastal Command, firstly in Gibraltar and then in the UK. Coastal Command’s role was searching for U-boats and enemy shipping and protecting the vital Allied shipping convoys.
Looking at my son Ben’s marquetry portrait of my Dad as a young man brought a lot of revelations. Ben’s extraordinary work in wood is based on a photograph that appeared on the front page of the Newcastle Herald under the headline of “A Digger and His Mate”, I guess somewhere between 1933-1935. I saw in this portrait what my Dad was as a young man and what he wanted to be as he grew older. I was moved by those insights to write “Lament for a Light Horseman”.
Looking at my son Ben’s marquetry portrait of my Dad as a young man brought a lot of revelations. Ben’s extraordinary work in wood is based on a photograph that appeared on the front page of the Newcastle Herald under the headline of “A Digger and His Mate”, I guess somewhere between 1933-1935. I saw in this portrait what my Dad was as a young man and what he wanted to be as he grew older. I was moved by those insights to write “Lament for a Light Horseman”.
“A Digger and His Mate”
~ marquetry by Ben Creighton ~
~ marquetry by Ben Creighton ~
Lament for a Light Horseman
~ for my father, Reg Creighton, 1913-1981 ~
How young and untouched you are,
dashing in your emu-plumed hat,
your face, in profile, full of hope,
a little smile flickering on your lips.
You hold her by the bridle throatlatch.
Her mixture of fear and curiosity amuses you.
Her ears are forward. Her eyes stare.
What is it that you whisper?
Don’t worry, Pol, it’s only a camera.
Click! And there you are, for that moment
always young, happy and idealistic.
Perhaps you were just twenty two.
That was before your marriage,
before you left for war,
before you left behind your pregnant wife,
before, night after night,
17,000 kilometres from home
you spent the years of what remained
of your young life in the danger and cold
of a canvas-covered aircraft,
protecting shipping lanes
and searching for U-boats,
first skimming low over the blue Mediterranean
and then later the great dark cold North Sea,
unwaveringly following your conscience,
surviving who knows what to finally come home.
Then you were just thirty three.
I wish I could write a happy ending for you,
one like those Westerns you so loved,
have your horse, Polybon, waiting for you,
have you hero-like swing into the saddle,
lift your bride up behind you,
and whilst the credits roll
turn away from the camera and canter
towards family and contentment
in those distant blue mountains.
But that is not your story.
After eighteen happy and generous years
when your family grew and you rebuilt your life,
you became sick, your lungs shrunk,
your evenings were destroyed with coughing
and a desperate struggle for air.
You said it was chronic illness from the War.
You said it was from flying in the freezing night.
Eventually a reluctant government agreed.
You were only fifty one.
And I must write of your last seventeen years
when something dark and terrible
and utterly beyond your control
emerged to periodically overpower
who I think you wanted to be.
I don’t know what caused that unhappiness.
Dormant darkness belatedly emerging from the war?
A side effect from all that medication?
Or something always in you,
some human flaw hidden by youth
that emerged with age and hard experience
to periodically rage with such fierceness?
And when the rage passed,
did you even remember
who you had momentarily been?
If I could, I would wash away those last years,
from a deep well fetch water of such sweetness
as to soothe and heal all the mind’s wounds.
What is it that you wanted?
You were too edgy for mere contentment.
I know you strongly desired esteem and recognition
and I have seen in that portrait
both the young man you once were
and the person you wanted to be.
The teenage me, caught and confused
by the ferocity of your change,
had to reject the external mania.
Now, if I could, I would tell you
that these older eyes
have searched your deep core
to seek what lay hidden behind
trauma, temper, days and weeks
of interminable conflict and rage,
mere externals the years are washing away
to reveal a complex and good man trapped
by something vastly beyond his control.
You did not live a long life.
Your heart gave out.
We gathered around you in the hospital,
your wife and four of your five children.
For about a week you lingered,
gaining comfort from our presence.
Then you fell into unconsciousness
and the green monitor flat-lined.
He’s gone, I said.
He’s not, she said, in momentary disbelief.
Then briefly and tenderly she touched you,
forehead to forehead, before,
emotionally exhausted, we left together
in strange mixture of grief and relief.
You were not quite sixty eight.
© 2019 Neil Creighton
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF