Beyond That Wall: A Villanelle Tribute to World War 2 Veterans

My Great uncle is now 93 years old. He has been happily married for more than 63 years and has lived an active and full life. His body is finally beginning to grow frail and the years have caught up with him but his recollection of those days is still as clear as ever, days of war and of mass bloodshed on the battlefields of Europe more than 60 years ago.

He tells this story as if it were yesterday, vivid recollections of an Italian beach. Not the Italian beaches of sunbathing and glorious sunny days on the Riviera but the beaches of death and of loss and of fear. The shrapnel still lodged in his neck a constant reminder.

The situation the allied soldiers found themselves in was precarious. They had landed on an Italian beach and were being machine gun strafed by enemy fighter planes. There was a wall between them and relative safety and they either had to make a run for the wall or die where they stood.

When you live to be as old as my Uncle, it is inevitable that the story gets told and re told. I have heard it at countless family gatherings over the years and each time it sends a chill down my spine and now the story stays with me to pass on to others, for there will come a time when there are no veterans of this war left to tell their own tale.

What follows is a poem, a villanelle in fact that I wrote with my uncles experience on that Italian beach being played movie like in my mind.

I hope that I have captured its spirit, I hope I have captured their (the veterans and heroes of World War II) spirit and bravery in these words.


An ending too swift for those that stall.
Machine guns rattle, spewing forth fire.
Another day lies beyond that wall.

Heart pounding, sprinting, afraid to fall.
Forever entombed, hellish quagmire.
An ending too swift for those that stall.

Blood washed sand, images that appal.
Must scramble, climb, higher still higher.
Another day lies beyond that wall.

Screaming agony, slowed to a crawl.
Burning comrades, most hideous pyre.
An ending too swift for those that stall.

Fizzing bullets, they beckon and call.
Seducing souls beginning to tire.
Another day lies beyond that wall.

Battered, yet not beaten, crimson squall.
Surging on, straining, life's great desire.
An ending too swift for those that stall.
Another day lies beyond that wall.

For those of you who are interested to know what a villanelle actually is, it's a form of poetry that has only two rhyming sounds. The first and third lines of the first stanza are repeated alternately as the third line of each following stanza throughout the poem until they meet to form a couplet at the end. You will see that the villanelle is 19 lines long, constructed of 5 tercets and an ending quatrain.