DISTANT REMEMBRANCE

All sunny smiles, and jokes, and tan, and twenties
the Kiwi working in our labs told me
that he, and a bunch of mates, had spent the week
on holiday in Turkey.  When I laughed
imagining the beer, and foreign girls
in insubstantial clothes, he shook his head
and said they’d visited Gallipoli.

Each of them had relatives who died
great-grandfathers, great-uncles for the most.
Though no-one now alive remembers them
there were letters, photos, medals, memories.
He said, they felt they knew them well enough;
the sunny boys with smiles and tans and jokes
who never left their twenties. Then he smiled.
There was, in fact, some beer involved, he said.