Armistice Day

[hawkwing_lb]

Photographs line one arm of the stairs of the grand neo-classical Museum Building in college. Dead men, bright and shiny - even happy - in their military uniforms.

I sometimes wonder why they volunteered. I wonder if, at the end of the Great War, their comrades who survived really believed it was the War To End All Wars, that there would be no real wars to follow it.

---

"In Memoriam"

Now let the silent cannons fall,
and roar no more, but overturned
in silence still the bloody call
for wars in whose fires we burned.

Turn us now to deeds of peace: let
soldiers rest in home's green fields,
reap for their harvest grain, and set
in hand no weapon, no cry of "Yield!
Or die!" in our peace-yearning throats,
no killing winter to slice our coats

To ribbons on a foreign plain,
far from home and the lives we knew.
Make amends. Let us now attain
our glories not through the red hue
of slaughter, but by building hope anew:
learn healing; heal ourselves. Live free: speak true.

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I might not mark it to the minute, but it is worth marking.