Marcia wrote:
Poems I read in church this morning before we stood in silent remembrance.
Dulce et Decorum est
by Wilfred Owen who was killed in action on 4 November 1918 exactly one week (almost to the hour) before the signing of the Armistice and was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant the day after his death. His mother received the telegram informing her of his death on Armistice Day, as the church bells were ringing out in celebration.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime. --
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my help less sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
How To Kill
by Keith Douglas who was killed in 1944, during the invasion of Normandy, when he was 24 years old.
Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.
Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears
And look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.
The weightless mosquito touches
her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches
The thousand-mile stare
by Colonel Simon Marr, MBE
Operation Herrick, Afghanistan, 2007 and 2010
Winding in a corkscrew of torque and pitch,
we plunged downwards from cloudless heights of blue
to roll seasick through steep banks and sharp twists.
Jagged shards of shadow and light stabbed through
our porthole views over Afghan plains.
As we landed inside the Helmand camp,
our wheels kissed the sand in metal washes of noise.
The troops rose clumsily and moved off the ramp,
swallowed from view by the sandstorm. Young boys,
wide eyes, plump faces, fresh combats, clean boots.
In this brutal patchwork of the Green Zone
it's one more unremarkable outpost.
Here, for six bloody months, far from home,
men dance with death and brush past the ghosts
who squat in the shadows of mud walls.
I twisted and squinted through the perspex pane,
but there was only dust, gravel, wire and sun.
I'd seen enough and I turned round again.
Opposite me, new shapes slumped, with their guns
laid casually over their knees.
We lifted clear to a steady hover
and then surged giddily to blue safety.
Your head feels squashed by the mounting pressure,
your ears pop and you grab straps to steady
yourself. And then we levelled and slowed.
I watched the soldier sat across from me.
His helmet was off. I studied his face.
His cheeks were hollow. Blond hair had burst free
in random clumps from his crewcut - no grace
the fatigue lines that etched his skin.
He had a week of stubble, maybe more.
He never looked at me, but I watched his eyes.
They hardly blinked, remained on the gunner's door.
People have told me that when someone dies
you can see life ebb and then seep away.
And these eyes were losing their light, fading blue,
not even the flicker of a dying flare.
Nothing seemed to register and I knew
that I was looking at the thousand-mile stare.
We conclude our words on remembrance with the well-known words from Laurence Binyon’s poem, For the Fallen, written in September 1914.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
we will remember them.
I remember Wilfred Owen from a British lit class I took back in my college days. He remains one of my favorite English born poets.
-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer
11 Nov 2011, 1:19 pm
