Memorial Day

For those of us who have opposed the GeorgeBush/DickCheney war in Iraq, Memorial Day carries bittersweet ambivalences: full support and profound appreciation for the sacrifices made by our young men and women; and profound anger and, yes, outright hatred for those who sent them to war needlessly.

The best I can come up to express my feelings about war is the World War I British poet, Wilfred Owen, who was killed in battle in France at age 25, one week prior to the Armistice. Unlike many of his contemporaries who extolled the glory of England and its war heroes, Owen wrote of the "pity of war," His poetry was mordantly anti-war, yet it glows with a poignant and loving concern for those who would lose their youth, if not in fact their lives.

As a preface to the single volume of his poems, published after his death, his editor has included these words from Owen's writing:

“This book is not about heroes. . . . Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.

"My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

"Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn."

Benjamin Britten used Owen's poetry, interspersed with Latin texts from the requiem mass, in his monumental "War Requiem." Two passages that move me most are these:

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where is the lamb for this burnt-offering?

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not they hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Futility

Move him into the sun --
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
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?

What a powerful, penultimate line: "Was it for this the clay grew tall?" Is this senseless slaughter what we have come to as the crowning achievement of eons of evolution that produced Shakespeare, and Einstein and Picasso, and Beethoven and Faulkner? And Jesus and Ghandi, and Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Can we not do better than send our sons and daughters off to slaughter and be slaughtered?

Ralph