Penrith Remembers

Outside our British Legion, there is a memorial for those that fell in the Great War.

It seems such a long time ago that I helped plan this memorial - it is a wild flower bed, with Flanders poppies which surrounds a cross for each person that did not come home - all of them.

My input was to suggest that in this field, we place a copy of the Rupert Brooke poem The Soldier, so we could bring a corner of that foreign field home again.

I think it has worked fantastically!

The Soldier

IF I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.