The non-mawkish remembrance day thread.

[Steve H]

Post your favourite relevant quotations etc. (Not your own stuff, I suggest.)

Strange Meeting
BY WILFRED OWEN

It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”
“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now. . . .”

[Walter]

You've reminded me why I hated poetry at school

[Roses]

Remember Our Innocence
(WW1)

Eagerly they accepted the King’s shilling,
Fresh-faced youths responded to the call.
Most caught up in fervent patriotic naivety,
Keenly anticipating a glorious adventure.
Soon nationalistic fantasy confronted grim reality,
Youthful idealism was swiftly obliterated
Amidst a Hellorama of mud, screams and gore.
Those long dead boys call to the living,
When our war is a dusty recollection
Our motives misrepresented and misunderstood,
Please Remember Our Innocence.

RJG

[/b]

My paternal grandfather survived WW1 but his lungs were damaged having been gassed. My father remembered him as rarely being well during his childhood. My grandfather insisted his wife and family were evacuated to the UK in 1939, before Germans invaded the Channel Islands, he stayed behind to look after the family farm. He died in 1943 at the young age of 48.

[Steve H]

Oh well - it was only a suggestion.

[Robbie]

  typical!

I think this isa very good thread, i didn't intend to post another Wilfred Own but do like this:-

Futility - Wilfred Owen

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

[Robbie]

An extract from War and Peace by Felicia Dorothea Hemans

Now, while the sounds of martial wrath assail,
While the red banner floats upon the gale;
While dark destruction, with his legion-bands,
Waves the bright sabre o'er devoted lands;
While war's dread comet flashes thro' the air,
And fainting nations tremble at the glare;
To thee, Futurity! from scenes like these,
Pale fancy turns, for heav'n-imparted ease;
Turns to behold, in thy unclouded skies,
The orb of peace in bright perspective rise;
And pour around, with joy-diffusing ray,
Life, light, and glory, in a flood of day!

[Robbie]

The Sound of Guns - Gerald McCarthy

At the university in town
tight-lipped men tell me the war in Vietnam is over,
that my poems should deal with other things[. ]
  ***

At nineteen I stood at night and watched
an airfield mortared. A plane that was to take
me home, burning; men running out of the flames.

Seven winters have slipped away,
the war still follows me.
Never in anything have I found
a way to throw off the dead.

[Robbie]

The Nagasaki Elder - Antony Owen

She said don’t go to the shadows without water –
I have tried to erase him for sixty-four years
and my wrists are tired;
I have scrubbed the darkness of my son
so he could be buried at last in sunlight.

Don’t go to my son without removing your shoes –
I have tried to bathe him with prayers and carbolic
but he only gets blacker;
I have lived for ninety-nine years
and starlings are beginning to land by my feet.

Don’t wind the paralysed clock,
it is rebuilding the world with seared hands –
I have tried to turn back time
but God will not allow it in Nagasaki;
I had tried to make another child but gave birth to pink curd.

Don’t tell them my name,
and look me in the face when you see him –
I have tried to understand
why ink is only spilled by vaporised kin;
I have tried to write a haiku
for the willow which strokes my son.

Don’t disturb my son
when the raven plays in the shape of his spectre –
I have tried to shoo it away and it quarrels with my broomstick;
I have tried to tell my son that he was ten yards from living.

I have tried to feed a Nagasaki starling
when it drank the black rain;
I have tried to get it to sing so this wraith could be comforted –
 don’t disturb my grave and desecrate me

with twitching shadows.

[Nearly Sane]

I looked into the darkness
And there they were.
Some were barely twenty
A few a little more.

They did not move,
They were dead.
And the war went on without them.

Back into the jungle,
Like deadly ghost we went.
I looked behind me,
They did not follow.

They did not move.
They were dead.
And the war went on without them.

A flash of fire, a terrible pain,
I cry out for my mother
Wait for me I cried.
But no one heard.

I did not move,
I was dead.
And the war went on without me.

[Robbie]

The Star Shell

A star-shell holds the sky beyond
Shell-shivered Loos, and drops
In million sparkles on a pond
That lies by Hulluch[iii] copse.

A moment's brightness in the sky,
To vanish at a breath,
And die away, as soldiers die
Upon the wastes of death.
                        --Patrick MacGill

[Robbie]

Terrors of War: Mushroom Cloud

Nobody ever saw it coming,
Just when children are out playing,
A silent death came from above,
Robbing the souls of all the ones we love.

The seed of destruction spread its doom,
Annihilating anything that feels is gloom,
Their cries never to be heard,
Its flash left only remains of dirt.

When the cloud of demise lifts its veil,
Only hell can describe without fail,
The landscape painted with black death,
Left on the Earth a scar of memorable depth.

On that day, fateful and hated,
Souls and cities perished in hatred,
Till today, when the cloud is nowhere to be seen,
That moment forever to be felt,
such an unpleasant scene…

The Poet

[Anchorman]

As per NS' suggestion, Eric Bogle's brilliant song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnFzCmAyOp8

[Roses]

It is 100 years today since the first Armistice Day commemoration with the 2 minute silence, which my husband and I observed whilst we were having our morning coffee.

[Bramble]

Why patriots are a bit nuts in the head - Roger McGough

Patriots are a bit nuts in the head
because they wear
red white and blue tinted spectacles
(red for blood,
white for glory
and blue ... for a boy)
and are in effervescent danger
of losing their lives.
Lives are good for you.
When you are alive
you can eat and drink a lot
and go out with girls
(sometimes
if you are lucky
you can even go to bed with them)
But you can't do this
if you have your belly shot away
and your seeds spread out over some corner
of a foreign field
to facilitate
in later years
the growing of oats
by some peasant yobbo

when you are posthumous
it is cold and dark
and that is why patriots
are a bit nuts in the head

[Dicky Underpants]

Oh well - it was only a suggestion.

And a great one. It's a very moving poem, despite a few rather stilted and purple passages. Becomes even more powerful in the setting in Britten's War Requiem. That's a work which I have an ambivalent response to - especially the choral passages, but the settings of Owen's poems are especially forceful.

[Dicky Underpants]

typical!

I think this isa very good thread, i didn't intend to post another Wilfred Own but do like this:-

Futility - Wilfred Owen

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

That's an even better poem of Owen's than the one Steve posted. Succinct, and as hard-hitting in the pessimism of its last lines as the whole of Schopenhauer.

Here's another succinct one by Siegfried Sassoon - doesn't have the universal quality of the one you quoted, but conveys a similar sense of disillusion.

The General

“Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He's a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

[Robbie]

And a great one. It's a very moving poem, despite a few rather stilted and purple passages. Becomes even more powerful in the setting in Britten's War Requiem. That's a work which I have an ambivalent response to - especially the choral passages, but the settings of Owen's poems are especially forceful.

Dicky you misunderstood what Steve said, if you go back to his opening post and then read above his post where he said 'it was only a suggestion  ', you'll get what he meant  .
I like your Sassoon poem.

Bramble the poem you posted is a-maz-ing! Very true (what we expect from one of the Liverpool poets).

[Dicky Underpants]

Dicky you misunderstood what Steve said, if you go back to his opening post and then read above his post where he said 'it was only a suggestion  ', you'll get what he meant  .

Oh - I thought he was referring back to Walter's post:

"You've reminded me why I hated poetry at school".

[Steve H]

I was referring to the resident solipsist's typical contribution.

[Robbie]

Exactly! 
Dicky, in Steven's op he said post poems but not ones we had composed, immediately afterwards someone posted a not very good poem they'd written themselves.

[Robbie]

After the Bomb  Mary Wilson

After the Bomb had fallen,
After the last sad cry
When the Earth was a burnt-out cinder
Drifting across the sky,

Came Lucifer, Son of the Morning,
With his fallen-angel band,
Silent and swift as a vulture
On a mountain-top to stand.

And he looked, as he stood on the mountain
With his scarlet wings unfurled,
At the charnel-house of London
And the cities of the world.

And he laughed..........

And as that mocking laughter
Across the heavens ran,
He cried 'Look!' to the fallen angels -
'This is the work of Man
Who was made in the image of God!'

[Steve H]

After the Bomb  Mary Wilson

After the Bomb had fallen,
After the last sad cry
When the Earth was a burnt-out cinder
Drifting across the sky,

Came Lucifer, Son of the Morning,
With his fallen-angel band,
Silent and swift as a vulture
On a mountain-top to stand.

And he looked, as he stood on the mountain
With his scarlet wings unfurled,
At the charnel-house of London
And the cities of the world.

And he laughed..........

And as that mocking laughter
Across the heavens ran,
He cried 'Look!' to the fallen angels -
'This is the work of Man
Who was made in the image of God!'

Not a bad poet, wasn't MW. I was surprised to read of her deasth last year, having thought she'd been dead for decades. She was 102!

[Robbie]

Yes I agree, a lovely poet. My mum had book of her poetry & some are especially moving.