Once there was, once there wasn't
a pocket watch that stopped a bullet
to his heart in the trenches at Gallipoli, 1915.
 
You'd think the young officer Kamil
would see a miracle in this, would
become religious and praise god. Allahu
 
ekber. But no; he saw the bodies
of men, bloody and broken, Mehmet
and Johnnie alike, broken and bloody
 
in Anzac Cove, on hillsides, in trenches,
while commanders drank tea and ordered
more to die. After he became Ataturk,
 
he said to the mothers of the invaders:
Your sons lie in our bosom at peace.
They are now our sons as well.
 
And people who remember this battle,
or who doubt this honor, gather here, bow
to another generation fallen in war,
 
to the flowered graves, the brave statues,
as the ever mourning tongue of the Aegean
turns luminous in praise.