Leo Marks-Yours

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours

The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause

For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours
And yours

Dedicated to the resistance fighter Violet Szabo and used in the film about her life and subsquent death at the hands of the Gestapo , ‘Carve her name with Pride’,this poem has a simplicity that is deeply affecting. I think I first came across the poem in the Radio Times and cut it out once using it in a Friday afternoon Sixth Form English lesson at Bolton School.

I felt it a real gift of a poem and this feeling remains with me, heightened by attending the funeral of a wonderful woman who was mother to one of the Bolton School English students, and whose support to me throughout my  dangerous illness and  early career as a teacher, was quite wonderful.

The poem was read out at at her funeral by her daughter, for her father,  and I wept.