24.8.1918

It was a Saturday
When Tom, my uncle died.
Eighty years later my mother still recalled
Her own mother’s tears and the telegram.

August 1918
The Twenty-fourth, the print out says,
From the Website.
It was a Saturday.
Tom Merritt.
He was only twenty-two,
A Private in the Middlesex Regiment
With no known grave
But his name liveth for evermore

In the perpetual care
Of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission
The print out says

And of his God.