I chose “Strawberries” by Wilfrid Gibson for a couple of reasons. The first reason being that I enjoyed reading about a different perspective in comparison to the main novels we’ve analyzed this year. While we have read a plethora of content centering soldiers, both on the home and fighting front, nurses, and regular civilians— there has been none about the physical standpoint of a young mother and wife. A wife who gave birth by herself, living with the knowledge that the father of her child could die, or already be dead, without ever meeting his youngest child. A mother who has been raising two children on her own for years, and working, and working, and working. All while simultaneously going “crazy” for thinking about the philosophy of war in general. For how could he, any solider “against their will,” go fight someone else he has never met and has no specific ill will towards? This poem goes to show how war is not only a hardship for the people in the center of it, but how war has a ripple effect that spreads out upon lands and people that have never seen the same privation. The second reason: As a child who has had a father in war, this poem wormed its way into my heart for the sake of my mother. 

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