Blast from the past - the start of Poetry Thursday

What is now Poetry Thursday on this blog had an unwitting start, a follow-on from a book project that involved memorising ten sonnets. Initially I tried to memorise a short poem a week, and later this morphed into researching the poem and its author ... and finding a picture to go with it. (Sometimes the picture came first.)

But the first poem memorised was only six lines long, and though the exact words escape me, "it" is very much with me, and very apt in a year commemorating the start of the First World War. The poem is by Rudyard Kipling, a writer with a sad childhood, sent away by his parents in India, to England to school, at the tender age of 6. The personal history of the writer is very much with me too.

 A Dead Statesman

I could not dig: I dared not rob:

Therefore I lied to please the mob.

Now all my lies are proved untrue

And I must face the men I slew.

What tale shall serve me here among

Mine angry and defrauded young?