Thank you to all veterans. Sometimes even the well meaning tend to fall in love with one image of the Soldier and ignores the great diversity both in people and responsibilities in our service men and women. Just today, we are reminded of that, preparing to go to parades while our marines are delivering humanitarian assistance and evacuating casualties in the Philippines among other places. The calendar takes on different shape overseas, not structured into months and weeks, with days off and holidays, but a series of tick marks marking how long, and how much time remains. On Veterans Day, that rare WWI poem, written by enlisted Soldier Isaac Rosenberg. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell has called this the greatest poem of the war 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 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 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, 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 Hurled through still heavens? What quaver—what heart aghast? Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins Drop, and are ever dropping; But mine in my ear is safe— Just a little white with the dust.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 14:40:51 +0000
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