Certa Cito

Tags

121 Signal Squadron, Australian poet, Australian traditional poetry, Formal poetry, Gough Whitlam, poem, poetry, Royal Australian Signal Corps, sonnet, Spenserian sonnet

𝑪𝒆𝒓𝒕𝒂 𝑪𝒊𝒕𝒐

The plan is hatched by foolish faceless men.
The squadron’s fate by treachery is sealed.
The method and the why, the where, the when,
Is to the gathered malcontents revealed.
All that the patriotic have concealed
Will be exposed just when the time is right;
The squadron will be banished from the field —
Its troops will be destroyed without a fight —
All trace of it will fade into the night,
And none will mourn its swift and sure demise;
And on its fate no one will shine a light.
But those who filled its ranks — its ears and eyes,
Who served and sweated on that Asian Hill,
They know how easily mere words can kill.

— D.N. O’Brien

Kranji

Tags

121 Signal Squadron, ANZUK Force, Australian traditional poetry, Kranji, poem, poetry, Singapore, Somerset Maugham, Straits of Johore

Those long remembered scented nights
Beneath the glow of Kranji’s lights,
Beside the pool, where once had danced
The girls the boys had once romanced.

The place still had the magic then,
And I’d imagine Maugham with pen
In that white house across the straits
As he wrote tales of men – their fates,

As sun, slow sinking, set the scene
On old Malaya warm and green,
And vanished slow, the grand old ways
As Empire lived its twilight days.