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[Lost]

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


I read this at my Dad's funeral and weirdly I found out about it when Dad and I were in his car driving to work about 2 months before he tragically died very suddenly and we both turned up the radio to listen and I remember him saying that it was a beautiful poem. There is a little dispute as to who wrote it but it is meant to have been written during the war by Violette szabo.

[JillB]

This is indeed a beautiful poem.
I thought readers may be interested in some info I have found, thanks to wikipedia.

"The Life That I Have (sometimes referred to as Yours) is a short poem written by Leo Marks and used as a poem code. In the Second World War, famous poems were used to encrypt messages. This was, however, found to be insecure because enemy cryptographers were able to locate the original from published sources.

Leo Marks countered this by using his own written creations. The Life That I Have was an original poem composed on Christmas Eve 1943 and was originally written by Marks in memory of his girlfriend Ruth, who had just died in a plane crash in Canada.

On 24 March 1944, the poem was issued by Marks to Violette Szabo, a French agent of Special Operations Executive who was eventually captured, tortured and killed by the Nazis. It was made famous by its inclusion in the 1958 movie about Szabo, called Carve Her Name with Pride, where the poem was said to be the creation of Violette's husband Etienne.

The authorship and claims of by Leo Marks are disputed in a book by Susan Ottaway"