Throw The Bastard Down.

 

"If he's dead; then throw the bastard down"

"But be quite sure" the CO said,

"Don't want him dropping all that way if he's alive"

"Information you know, what"!

 

The Malayan hills are soft

And the hard rain slices them like cheese,

Leaving 'Gunongs'.

Two hundred foot pillars of rock.

With green hair!

                  That's where

                                 The CT was

                                              On top

                                                     of a

                                                        Gunong,

                                                               Dead,

                                                                    Killed

By his jungle weary bodyguards who wished to surrender

Against their Commanders wishes, so they shot him

And then surrendered.

 

And he was dead all right.

The lad from Bolton who had done some rock climbing

Was up there and he said he was dead,

With a Bolton accent.

 

"Then throw the bastard down" the CO repeated,

So they threw the bastard down,

We heard them counting, "One-Two-Three and,

Through the protesting bushes flew a dead man,

A wingless Bird-man,

Dead before he hit the ground,

Arms open in forgiveness,

Christlike, suspended in deaths limbo,

 

Glancing from an outcrop and searing my damned memory,

Then falling, falling,

A bastard, a throw down bastard.

THROW THE BASTARD DOWN!

 

They picked him up, one to a limb, the swinging head between.

It did not matter to him

That he had been thrown down,

I was the degraded one,

My uniform branded me

As 'A thrower down of bastards'.

 

RDS. March 6 1973