Cargo 200 – Special Delivery

A run on the rouble in the Russian State Bank,

the Muscovites cursing the Brits and the Yanks,

the young mother fretting for her son in his tank

while the old man beside her his face has turned blank.

His i-phone appended to his hairy red ear

as she frowns and she strains in an effort to hear,

then watches his face morph from blankness to fear

and shake like an earthquake as he trembles in tears.

He stumbles by the wall as she recognised the phrase

that he mumbled from her own Army conscript days,

a blunt military code word - what an eloquent way

of telling a relative their son has passed away!

But its bigged up with a tribute, some flags and whistles too

for the Motherland is grateful for the sacrifice from you,

whose son the State honours with a kopek or two

victim of a conflict you’d never heard of too.

When the heavy zinc coffin is delivered to his door

the stricken old man will ask just what his son died for.

The captain will shrug his shoulders and say I know no more

but plonks the coffin down on a threadbare floor.

Then he slips a piece of paper in the old man’s hand

and says ring up these people they know and understand

what it’s like to lose a son in a far flung foreign land

The Committee of Soldiers Mothers refuses to disband.

They will help him in his quest to find out how and why

he never knew his son went off to foreign lands to die

for an autocratic government which obfuscates and lies

while Putin counts his matchsticks as men who flare and die.