NAOMI Mitchison, scion of the intellectual Haldane family, and herself a prolific novelist and general writer, penned this heartfelt elegy for the lost young of the First World War. It is included in the forthcoming anthology, Beneath Troubled Skies: Poems of Scotland at War, 1914-1918, compiled and edited by Lizzie MacGregor, with commentaries by Yvonne McEwen and a foreword by Sir Hew Strachan (Polygon, 12.99).
GREEN BOUGHS
My young, dear friends are dead,
All my own generation.
Pity a youthless nation,
Pity the girls unwed,
Whose young lovers are dead.
They came from the gates of birth
To boyhood happy and strong,
To a youth of glorious days,
We give them honour and song,
And theirs, theirs is the praise.
But the old inherit the earth.
They knew what was right and wrong,
They were idealists,
Clean minds, my friends, my friends!
Artists and scientists,
Their lives that should have been long!
But everything lovely ends.
They came from college and school,
They did not falter or tire,
But the old, the stupid had rule
Over that eager nation,
And all my own generation
They have cast into the fire.
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