Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day/ Armistice Day has always been special for me. One of my favourite reads growing up was Knights of the Air, about Canadian aces in the First World War. “In Flanders Fields” was the first poem I memorized.

Here are a couple of my war poems, in honour of the day:

Armistice 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 damn 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 bloody 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.

Korea, Summer, 1951: A Canadian Who Did Not Survive Remembers

August in Asia is hotter than death;
Christ, that a cold rain could fall!
Like the rains that I knew where the jackpines grew
In Canada, when I was small.

Every rock, every brick, is as hot as a wick,
And wickedly ripples the air;
If I could I would go where the sweet Chinooks blow,
For I know of no night fevers there.

I don't that much mind that I die here or there;
When you're dead, you're just dead, as a rule.
But please don't cremate me, deep-freeze me in state--
Damn Sam McGee, let me die cool.