Memorial Day 2023

I honor the dead, many who went off to fight a very different war than what developed, or who didn't want to fight at all but had no choice, those who died saving a comrade , or ignominiously in the bottom of a foxhole. They gave their lives for a cause, or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I mourn the fighters and the innocent victims of war. Whatever the reason, I honor them and mourn the all the lives cut short. 

I do not glorify war or celebrate it. I wish humanity could find another way...

I offer the following poem because it describes the awful reality of war, not the flags and the fireworks or even the tombstones of Flanders fields.
It was written by Wilfred Owen while he was in hospitalized in Edinburgh recovering from what was then called 'shell shock'.  After he recovered, he went back to rejoin the war and was killed in Northern France at the age of 25,  just a week before the war ended . 

 
EXPOSURE
Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knife us...
Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent...
Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient...
Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
   But nothing happens.

Watching we hear the mad gusts tugging the wire
Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.
Northward incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,
Far off, like a dull rumor of some other war.
   What are we doing here?

The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow...
We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.
Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army
Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of gray
   But nothing happens.

Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.
Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow,
With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause and renew,
We watch them wandering up and down the wind's nonchalance,
   But nothing happens
                                                       II

Pale flakes with lingering stealth come feeling for our faces...
We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow dazed,
Deep into grassier ditches, so we drowse, sun-dozed,
Littered with blossoms, trickling where the blackbird fusses.
   Is that we are dying?

Slowly our ghosts drag home, glimpsing the sunk fires glazed
With crusted dark red jewels: crickets jingle there;
For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;
Shutters  and doors all closed: on us the doors are closed...
   We turn back to our dying.

Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;
Now ever suns smile true on child, field or fruit.
For God's invincible spring our love is made afraid;
Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born
   For love of God seems dying.

Tonight, His frost will fasten on this mud and us.
Shriveling many hands and puckering foreheads crisp.
The burying party, picks and shovels in their shaking grasp,
Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,
   But nothing happens