Mihran Kalaydjian's Official Blog

(Ode to Bernard Jordan)

His great escape
Didn’t come during
His turbulent days
At bloody Normandy,
Or while diving
Into a sunken submarine
To recover the enemies
Decoder to identify vessels,
But at the age of ninety
When told he could not go
To remember his
Fallen friends at the D-Day
Memorial service in France,
He was to old to show
He had never forgotten,
Like a POW he snuck
From the walls that held him,
Boarded the coach,
Drank, danced, flirted
Across the channel,
“If I were seventy
years younger
I wouldn’t know
which of you
To ask to dance”
Even forgetting
Which hotel was his,
But he made the fallen
Proud once again
And showed that even
After seventy long years
Britain had never forgotten,
And he did it with a grace
That only a British
Soldier could,
Tenacity in the face of adversity,
Never surrender!

Poem ©…