"Dn Sidi Reszegh"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 215, 6 August 1943, Page 9

"Dn Sidi Reszegh"

Greece" from 4YA on Friday, July 16, Professor T. D. Adams said: "Her very soil has now become sacred to us because of our precious dead whose bodies are buried there. How many of us there are who remember our friends, our relatives, who are now a portion of the loveliness which once they made more lovely. Only yesterday I heard of the death and burial in Greece of one who, on Sidi Reszegh on the night before he was seriously wounded and taken prisoner, had composed a poem which I received and immediately broadcast just a year later. Its sincerity and simplicity and poetic feeling were immediately recognised by several discriminating listeners, and I am confident that it will find a place among the best poems of this war. This young New Zealand sheep-farmer, Don McDonald, of ‘Glendonald,’ Ngaroma, has expressed what might have been the feelings of many a New Zealander in the African desert. These are the three stanzas of his poem, ‘On Sidi Reszegh’": B, ten his "Salute to HILDREN are born in the land of the green grass springing, Knowing the voice of the streams and the rain’s caresses, Knowing the scent of the flowers, and the lark’s sweet singing, Feeling the West wind, cool in their bright young tresses. . Siege this is the Desert-Earth’s bones to the old Sun lying, A fit place this for the ancient passions’ burning; And men who were children in sweet green lands are dying, Bone of their bodies to bone of the Earth returning. | gE beliet their bodies through steel hail urges; It need be, here Ill die, my Fag braving The darkness; but ah, how the child in my heart ‘Bes, Yearning Fi for the larks, and the green grass waving.