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A quick whip-round for the long-suffering house band
I saw the news: "Biden administration to increase support for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits while serving overseas."
Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.
Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men's are, dead.
Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.
So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent;
Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.
Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild train-loads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to village wells
Up half-known roads.
—Wilfred Owen, "The Send-Off" (1918)
Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.
Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men's are, dead.
Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.
So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent;
Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.
Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild train-loads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to village wells
Up half-known roads.
—Wilfred Owen, "The Send-Off" (1918)
no subject
Thank you for the Owen poem, which I did not know.
no subject
Thank you.
Thank you for the Owen poem, which I did not know.
I got it from Tim Kendall's Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology (2013). When Wes came home from his first tour in duty, in Iraq, I gave him the complete poems of Wilfred Owen and discovered he already knew "Dulce et Decorum Est": his commanding officer in country had kept a copy tacked up beside his bunk. For all that the Bush administration had tried to sell the war as the second coming of WWII, I thought it significant it was the poets of the trenches the soldiers themselves went back to.