He was living on borrowed time,

he used to say

from the Olympus of his seventy-seven winters.

He'd already had his alloted three score years and ten,

and now he lived on the crumbs gathered

from the bread broken in the trenches of the Somme

and scattered over No-Man’s Land.

And at remembrance time

he would commemorate them fiercely,

clinging tenaciously to the faces and voices that

animated his days, as if to his own life,

feeling the melt of their Eucharist on his tongue.

And on such days, he would sip at his tea

harshly, as if he were drinking their blood.

For sixty years he had kept this communion,

kept faith with them and life itself.

And on the day he died,

emptying the ashes from the firestep of his hearth,

glancing round the faces for the very last time,

he cast into the air his last remaining handful of crumbs.

We shall gather and remember them.