Amanuensis Monday - Grandma Hill's Poetry, Week 37

Gold Star Mothers

We Gold Star Mothers, seen looking today through a sheen.

We who were saddened, ere the truce of 1918.

We were glad to see the return of the other brave boys

Our sorrow, momentarily eased, by their gladness and noise.

We saw them  greeted by happy mothers,

as they marched gaily along

And then we thought of our own dear sons,

they had left behind

We were glad to see them march gaily to the music and song

But it made our tears fall so thickly, they made us blind.

We thought of our own boys, who fought so bravely, and fell

On the blood stained battlefields, in the cold muddy trench

Causing us a sorrow, no tongue can possibly tell

And no show of pomp or glory, can ever quench.

We think of the many saddened mothers of today

As they watch their sons, march so blithely away.

Will they be called upon to suffer, so bitterly as we?

Or will their boys come back, and gladness they’ll see?

May our sad lot be spared these brave mothers, we pray,

Tho’ our sons fell for their country, on a foreign main

May their brave sons bring back our proud emblem and say

We finished their victory, they died not in vain.

Nancy Jane Wiley Hill (1875-1960) was always writing something.  Many of those poems are now in the possession of her granddaughter Shirley Kern.  Shirley, with the help of her sister-in-law Ruth Ormsby, transcribed these poems in 1996 for a Hill-Ormsby-Kern family reunion.  I am going to post many of these poems so that they may be enjoyed by all.

These are copyright 1996 and reprinted with permission.