And then you find a poem...

This week I added A Moment in Time, by H.E. Bates to my eBay bookshop, but what stopped me in my tracks was the poem, unattributed, but presumeably by Bates himself. A Moment in Time is set in Southern England in the summer of 1940, the year of the Battle of Britain and this poem memorialises the brave pilots.

Give them their life;

They do not know how short it grows;

So let them go

Young-eyed, steel-fledged, gun-furious,

For if they live they'll live,

As well you know,

Upon the bitter kernels of their sweet ideals.

Give them their wings:

They cannot fly too high or far

To soar above

The dirty-moted, bomb-soured, word-tired world.

And if they die they'll die,

As you should know,

More swiftly, cleanly, star-defined than you will ever feel.