For Remembrance Sunday

HarryVegas

HarryVegas

Well-known member
My favourite contemporary poem, bar none, from the great ex-laureate Carol Ann Duffy ...

'In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.'
Wilfred Owen

If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud ...

but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home -
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.

Dulce - No - Decorum - No - Pro patria mori.
You walk away.

You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too -
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert -
and light a cigarette.

There's coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.
You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.

If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.
 
Why are they selling poppies, Mummy? Selling poppies in town today.
The poppies, child, are flowers of love. For the men who marched away.

But why have they chosen a poppy, Mummy?
Why not a beautiful rose?
Because my child, men fought and died in the fields where the poppies grow.

But why are the poppies so red, Mummy? Why are the poppies so red?
Red is the colour of blood, my child. The blood that our soldiers shed.

The heart of the poppy is black, Mummy. Why does it have to be black?
Black, my child, is the symbol of grief. For the men who never came back.

But why, Mummy are you crying so? Your tears are giving you pain.
My tears are my fears for you my child. For the world is forgetting again.
 
I found out there was a British soldier buried in the military cemetery near me so went to find his grave this morning to pay my respects and to lay a poppy. After I got home I did some research and it seems a really sad story....died alone and 4,000 miles from home aged 25, only 6 weeks after the end of WW2. Seems he was rescued from a Japanese prisoner of war camp and taken to a US army base not far from here where he subsequently passed away. Poor lad spent the majority of his short adult life at war. I suspect there is no one left at home who even thinks of him now :(

RIP Cyril


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Suicide In The Trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

* * * * *

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Written in 1917 by Siegfried Sassoon
 
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