Remembrance Day

We are the dead

It's a hell of a way from yesterday
And all behind is burning.
We frog-march on to invisible dawn
From whence there is no turning.

There was a war, there is a war, there ever a war will be;
Who was that raving charlatan we hanged on Calvary?

Each human heart is blown apart
Six ways before September
The whores of chance hex backward glance
And delicate lads dismember.

There was a war, there is a war, there ever a war will be;
The carrion chorus sounds above Megiddo’s blood-drenched sea.

Love a thing, and watch it die
And only death's forever;
In wave-swept graves in parts we lie
And yet each year remember.

There was a war, there is a war, there ever a war will be;
The bloody track leads back from where we nailed him to a tree.

There's no escape from sorrow, boys,
Between here and high heaven;
Only pray the guns may pause
In the eleventh month, on the eleventh day,
As bells toll eleven.

-- Stephen K. Roney