The South African
Winifred Emma May (1907-1990) is probably more familiar to at least older readers by her pen-name: 'Patience Strong', famous (or notorious) for her 'inspirational' but usually rather sentimental - even at times somewhat sickly - verse. It was most often encountered by the casual reader in odd corners of women's magazines, or embellishing 'pretty' greetings cards.
The last thing anyone would credit her with (I suppose) is war poetry. Yet I recently came across her short verse "A Handful of Earth", which, while not exactly dripping with blood and horror, does for a moment step outside her more familiar world of roses round the kitchen door and faith in a beneficent Creator. It was reproduced on the back cover of a 1994 edition of the magazine "This England" (by no means a stranger to sentimental contributions) in Strong's familiar format of rhyming verses set out as prose.
Here it is:
The soldier knelt upon the ground and sifted through his hand - a crumbling clod of enemy earth; a fragment of the land - that had bred the marching hosts who, flushed with pride and hate - had trampled France and now stood triumphant at the Channel gate.
A tear fell on the alien dust. A glad and grateful prayer - surged up in his heart as he remembered, kneeling there - English earth; the Oxford lawns; the fens; the Devon loam; - Dorset pastures; Kentish orchards; Shakespeare’s meadow...
Home!
While clearly dated to the period of WW2, Strong's chronology is a bit confused: the soldiers sifts a clod of "enemy earth" by which one would assume German soil, yet at the time the German army is standing 'at the Channel gate' - the French coast, which would pose problems for an English soldier wanting to grab a handful of German soil. Or perhaps he was a PoW?
Although best known for her verses, which probably constituted her main source of royalty and commission income since they first appeared in the Daily Mirror in 1935, it's only fair to note that Winifred May was also (according to Wikipedia) 'a successful lyricist, composing English words for the tango "Jealousy" and "The Dream of Olwen", and an author of several books dealing with Christianity and practical psychology'.
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