On this day we remember the missing. The millions and millions who were living, who are living, and missing. Except we don't. We'd rather forget them all and sip our soya latte or think about the death of a poet, the (trench ) lines of a poet that we know in our heart of hearts will take away nothing, add nothing. God is difficult and distant and it has been raining all day. The grey rain, falling, falling, the sky darkening on a summer's day, as it has done before and as it no doubt will when we are gone. If a wound befalls us it has befallen others before us.
On this day 100 years ago 19, 240 British soldiers died in a battle that would eventually kill a million people. And yet we still cling to the delusion that the problem is religious fanaticism! The hilarity of hearing the dupes sing ' God save the Queen' gave way to a sadness that after all these years a flag can still move a person's heart, that tribal instincts still carom through our being, that a human being thinks it is noble to die unknown in the mud rather than stroll on a promenade on a bright and blustery Sunday morning.
Not this, not that, the Hindus say. I am not...I refuse...not in my name..instead, the brilliant darkness in the light. What is the " thisness" of my being but a question mark?
Break of Day in the Trenches
The darkness crumbles away
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy (5)
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies,
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German (10)
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life, (15)
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame (20)
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver -what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in men's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe, (25)
Just a little white with the dust.
-- Isaac Rosenberga
On this day 100 years ago 19, 240 British soldiers died in a battle that would eventually kill a million people. And yet we still cling to the delusion that the problem is religious fanaticism! The hilarity of hearing the dupes sing ' God save the Queen' gave way to a sadness that after all these years a flag can still move a person's heart, that tribal instincts still carom through our being, that a human being thinks it is noble to die unknown in the mud rather than stroll on a promenade on a bright and blustery Sunday morning.
Not this, not that, the Hindus say. I am not...I refuse...not in my name..instead, the brilliant darkness in the light. What is the " thisness" of my being but a question mark?
Break of Day in the Trenches
The darkness crumbles away
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy (5)
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies,
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German (10)
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life, (15)
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame (20)
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver -what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in men's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe, (25)
Just a little white with the dust.
-- Isaac Rosenberga
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