ABPA - Australian Bush Poets Association

The Last Goodbye

Now it’s faded memories we cling to at the old bush halls,
for the silent tread of long brave dead still echo through their walls.
Gone is the dawn of our golden youth and gone are small towns too,
swept away by hopeless, wasteful war - the life that we once knew.

Never more the strains of an old bush band will lift this pall of gloom,
though the aged gas lamps are hanging still from walls of each ballroom,
where the young ones danced the night away on waxed rough jarrah floors;
now it’s only hollow silence, that awaits beyond these doors.

There are ghostly streets in countless towns where seldom footsteps pass,
And the empty shops stare eerily through dust smeared panes of glass.
Like a last goodbye to those young men who sailed away to war,
monuments in every town - record the pain this county bore.

©T.E. Piggott

Quite right Terry, the world was never the same after 1914, and within the lifetime of those surviving, another generation of young men who would never return.

Nicely crafted Terry - I like this very much

Thanks Neville and Maureen

This is a subject I have always been interested in, in fact, I have been toying with the idea of writing a more substantial poem about this.
I have been told that young many women never married after losing fiancé's in that war. I suspect there would have also been quite a few single mothers as well for the same reason.
Also the hopes of families were also shattered; in some small towns and districts, most of their young men never came home.


Terry