The Life that I have by Leo Marks

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.

Its some time since I put a chocolate box poem on here but I was reminded of this one just a short while ago and of course I still love it for who could not?

However, its not really a chocolate box poem Its rather more often and just as famously known as The Code Poem for the French Resistance.

Here is a paragraph from Wikipedia:

In the war, famous poems were used to encrypt messages. This was, however, found to be insecure because enemy cryptanalysts were able to locate the original from published sources. 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.^[1] On 24 March 1944, the poem was issued by Marks to Violette Szabo, a French agent ofSpecial 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, Carve Her Name with Pride, where the poem was said to be the creation of Violette's husband Etienne. (Marks allowed it to be used under the condition that its author not be identified.)

And a link to the page:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_That_I_Have