Ar ben y bryn,
There sits a paint-brush-thin monument,
A crooked rocky record built by many unwilling hands.
This cockeyed testimony announces a difficult man,
A man befriended by nature
Whose oakish form turned in opposition to his kin,
Took root on stony ground,
Prospered on infertile soil
And sheltered under nature's canopy.

Y bryn oedd ei gartref
And he lived and thrived there
To the annoyance of the conformists:
The chapel-goers, the gossipers, the rate-payers
Those who could not abide his ragged clothing,
Sweat-stewed, blood-patched remnants of cloth,
Hanging rags of garments and barely-there shoes.
Loneliness he embraced and so peace was his.

Ar y bryn fu farw.
A few feigned to mourn to satisfy their curiousity,
Wanting to view the corpse of the man on the hill,
A man who was and wasn't one of them.
And so a dissonance struck the town:
He was one of them but also one of wild nature.
He was miserably poor but enviably free.
And out of such confusion was his half-hearted monument raised.

There was death and gore,

During the second world war.

Many people died in extreme violence,

Killed before they could call out to loved ones.

Young men were trained to ****,

Often against their morals and will.

So when I see your 1940s weekend -

Your 'war was fun and cosy' pretence,

Your clichéd polyester and fibre glass mockery,

Aiming to re-enact a mostly imagined happy-go-lucky camaraderie -

Forgive me for not joining in,

As I happen to feel it a cardinal sin,

To idealise and romanticise a decade,

Made up of austerity, rationing and air raids.

I've read a little social history,

The 1940s were not idyllic or crime-free,

Just as now, there were heroes and villains,

Among the soldiers and civilians.

Heroism abounded but so did black marketeering,

There were brave sacrifices but also racketeering.

City-wide black-outs were a gift,

To those who would rob and grift.

Your jolly nostalgic tribute is an annual celebration,

Celebrating your own fabrication,

Of a time when the machinations of war and a crazed ideology,

Saw the near extinction of an entire ethnic minority.

I do not wish to be a party pooper,

But don't just step into the fake shoes of a fictional trooper,

Please occasionally remove your rose-tinted glasses,

To remember that beyond your nostalgic narrative of the routines of the masses,

People lived with the daily fear,

Of the likely deaths of people they held dear.