May 28, 2012

A beautiful morning, sunny, warm, a bit of a breeze, my favorite sky, blue with white fair weather clouds, that build up and vanish while you watch them.  Kids are out on bicycles, riding in groups with dogs trailing after them.  Cars with boat behind them rounding the corner headed down toward the bay, people wanting to be on the water.  How many picnics will there be today? How may family get-togethers?  How many will remember those who helped secure our freedoms at the cost of their lives or their health or simply missing their children and spouses for months at a time, sometimes for years?

Memorial day . . . I am sending this poem about the people who go to war, and what happens for those left behind.  It's about a distant war, but there are really no distant wars, they are all connected, they are all won or lost by the soldiers fighting them for a cause, and there are always causes, and the people in power who send the soldiers, even by the families left behind, and the people those soldiers are fighting for, all are connected, and live with the victory or the defeat and the aftermath of both.  We have our freedoms as a result of sacrifice, of the will of the country to keep our freedom and our way of life.  We need to honor that will and those sacrifices.  We need to remember . . .

Edouard

Edouard shall we leave
tomorrow
for Verdun again
shall we set out for the great days
and never be the same
never
 

time
is what is left
shall we start
this time in the spring
and they lead your cows out
next week to sell at the fair
and the brambles learn to scribble
over the first field
 

Edouard shall we have gone
when the leaves come out
but before the heat
slows the grand marches
days like those
the heights and the dying
at thy right hand
sound a long horn
and here the bright handles
will fog over
things will break and stay broken
in the keeping of women
the sheep get lost
the barns
burned unconsoled in the darkness
 

Edouard what would you have given
not to go
sitting that last night by the fire
again
but shall we be the same
tomorrow night shall we not have gone
leaving the faces and nightingales
as you know we will live
and what never comes back will be
you and me
 

W. S. Merwin

It is one of the truest things ever written, that the people who come back from war are not the people who went, they are changed by the experience, some in ways that make them stronger, some in ways that haunt them the rest of their lives, and either way, those are the sacrifices we need to remember.  "What would you have given not to go" but they went and fought for what they believed in, and some lived to come home, and some did not, but even the living were changed, and their families were, and the country was changed by them.  And today we remember all of them, we have this day to say that we remember . . . that we might not understand all they sacrificed, all the ways they were changed, but that we honor them by remembering . . .