With grass between and dead folk under

[sovay]

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.

—Isaac Rosenberg, "Break of Day in the Trenches"

Comments

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

What can one say? Many things, but will it ever be enough?
And no one that I know of, left alive remembers. That still frightens me a little.

[sovay]

And no one that I know of, left alive remembers. That still frightens me a little.

I keep thinking about that. And then next year the communal act of remembrance which isn't quite going to be, because that community is gone: it is one thing to remember that a thing happened and another to remember the thing itself. (I worry about World War II vanishing the same way, especially when veterans are still alive and "Nazi" is a common and acceptable slur in popular political rhetoric. It doesn't even seem to take the death of a generation anymore.) I don't want to feel that I am living in an age of failing memory. I don't know how to say never again the trenches, never again genocide, never again soldiers no one will take care of when I can still see these things happening. '14–'18 was never going to be the war to end all wars, but I don't want it to be the war everyone remembers like a monument that doesn't, for all its white marble and poppies, change anything at all.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

I don't want it to be the war everyone remembers like a monument that doesn't, for all its white marble and poppies, change anything at all.

^^THIS^^

I suspect this is a lesson we will have to keep learning, and I don't think either of us or anyone we will ever know live to see it learned, but every once in a while, I allow myself the hope that it will be learned. That someone after us will learn it.

Been watching Avatar:TLA again, which makes me think of something Iroh said: "Hope is something you give yourself."

[sovay]

"Hope is something you give yourself."

Uncle Iroh was a very sensible man.

I hope your hope comes true.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

This indeed.

I wish such amazing poetry had not been summoned. But existing, it bears witness: it is living memory still.

Nine

[sovay]

I wish such amazing poetry had not been summoned. But existing, it bears witness: it is living memory still.

Yes. I value it.