The Missing Statues To Those Waiting To Be Honoured

The first armistice was declared for the eleventh hour
of the eleventh day of the eleventh month
one hundred and six years ago, in 1918.

That armistice was broken, dishonoured, and ignored
until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles 28th June 1919, 
five years to the day after the shot that started the war,
and assassinated Arch Duke Ferdinand, was fired.

The Allied signatories of the treaty
were France, Japan, Italy, Russia,
the UK and Northern Ireland, and the USA;
they all signed the document together.

The Central Powers/Central Empires, on the other side,
each signed individually. They were The German Empire,
Bulgaria-which had a Tsar until 1946, The Ottoman,
and lastly the Austro-Hungarian, empires.

The statues that mark the end of the war
that I want to see, but I know I won't find them,
are dedicated to all the unknown women
in the Allied countries who worked in the jobs
that the men left behind when they became soldiers. 

Those jobs had to be done, and when done by women
were done for much reduced pay. Those Women
'were not householders' and could not vote,
could not be recognised as citizens of their country.

Where are the statues to the women who nursed the men,
wounded on the battlefields, and did so much more besides? 
The statues to those women who held up half the skies
where the men flew to bomb the enemy underneath?
All whilst as women, hoping for more but  expecting less
sought to earned their part in the peacetime society
they believed would follow from their efforts. 

Let's Hear It For The Wives

of the many great male authors,
of the last 200 years, without whom
reading would not be the pleasure it is,
for readers all around the world.

Many male authors chose wives
as companions who were wise
in words and rich in ideas, women
who the law said were the property
of their husbands,
as chattels they were denied the vote.
And yet, uncredited,
and from the domestic sphere
they enriched the world of ideas.

Through their sense of economy
and practicality, they took literature
from being the muddled male domain
it had been since modern publishing began,
and had been for a l-o-n-g time,
to express ideas with which
everyone could identify.

And where their husbands were often poor 
because they were proudly pound foolish,
who lived in pound-foolish worlds,
the women kept their households afloat
with how penny wise they were.