May 29, 2023

As a poet I try to express messages that rise within me. I’m never sure where the words come from. I think of an idea, a situation or an event and I release the words. Once started I never know where a poem is heading. The words give birth to new words and sentences. The rhyming pattern navigates itself. The poem completes itself.

Today being Memorial Day I revisited a poem I wrote a few years ago about Remembrance Day.

I remember visiting a veteran’s hospital in 1966 and speaking with survivors of mustard gas attacks and talking with men who had been traumatized by shell shock. I still remember the sadness in their eyes and the regret in their voices. Their lives had been ruined by a war for which others who took no risks and suffered no pain – took the glory and the profits.

War is a manifestation of a deep form of insanity that deeply and horrifically infects humanity. 

This Memorial Day I find it disturbing that so little is said about the fact that it is Memorial Day.

Someone said to me today, “Happy Memorial Day.”

What does that even mean. This is not a day to be happy, to party and to have a good time.

It is a day where we should take time to remember.

Just yesterday I saw a man on the street begging for money. Not just any man but a legless veteran. What has this nation come to that a veteran who lost a leg for his country is not only not cared for by his country, but is forced to live in disgrace upon the streets of the nation he fought for?

Memorial Day has become a joke, a day of barbeques and parties without much thought even given to what the day means.

The poem I wrote in 2018 was entitled 11/11/11.

The worms churn inside me,

Gnawing relentlessly,

They whisper in my ear.

Haunted souls wishing to be free!

Sleeping restlessly,

Drowning hearts in dark fear.

The ghosts whisper to me,

Rising from the trenches,

Drooling blood, dripping mud.

We the living, we, who refuse to see.

Obsessed with our dark divisive fences,

Drowning in floods of ancient blood.

We have all forgotten,

Sacrifices have been in vain,

So many, so very young.

Stone gardens unattended and rotten,

For we are the insane,

And all our songs have been sung.

This angry grey rain that falls,

Their tears descending from heaven,

Upon the arrogant heads of state,

Who ignores their sad calls?

Eleven, Eleven, Eleven.

Their premature dark fate.

Their tears both beg and speak,

Demanding justice now,

Expensive suits grow damp,

Drop by drop by drop,

Dripping wet on each brow,

Drowning the flickering lamp.

Upon the fields of France,

The tears burst from the clouds.

A baptism of universal shame.

Nationalists begin their dance,

Rallying their hateful crowds,

To renew their evil game.

The Emperor remains dry,

Unanointed by the tears,

He spits upon the graves.

Deaf to every scream and cry,

Feeding the masses with fears,

Drowning freedom with slaves.

Bullets continue to kill.

Bombs continue to fall,

These wars that never end.

Graves continue to fill,

Building more trenches and walls.

An endless supply of bodies to spend.

They died to put an end to hell,

They died to end the nationalistic game.

They died for freedom and peace,

Hundreds of millions have fell.

We continue to live without shame,

Mocking the victims deceased.

Dreams slithered into the muck,

Awareness suddenly no more,

Bodies transformed into gore.

Soldiers betrayed by Lady Luck.

Dying on a distant foreign shore,

To the music of a cannon’s roar.

Ours is not to reason why,

Our is to shut the fuck up and die,

To expire like rag dolls on barbed wire,

Our only purpose to fight and die,

Without ever understanding why,

To fuel the desires of insane fires.

War begins from a tiny seed,

Propagated in a swamp of deceit,

Bodies crushed into obscene mud,

To serve the interests of greed,

By rich elites so very discreet,

These vampires who profit on blood.

Corpses can’t march in the proud parade

Their voices no longer count,

If they ever did.

Upon the marble, the wreath is laid,

A bronze horse stands without a mount,

As once again we open Pandora’s lid.