Aux Braves Morts Pour La France

.

On her way home from the station where

she had seen her brother off, Emily Perreau

remembered how they used to play in the rye

and how he would suddenly lie down and leave

her puzzled and happily horrified for minutes;

best was to do the same and wait for his

anxious bustling to serve him right.

.

Decades later, she would sometimes enter

the fields behind the family farm to revive

the very sensation and reduce his absence

to that light, short-lived torment of tease,

knowing that she could not turn things now,

but always hoping that he would rise

from the rye and find her.

.