Passing, Memorial Day Poem Options

[ace]

I have printed this before on another site, but it seems like worth repeating today.

ace

Passing

Once there were twelve million of us;
now a thousand a week fade away.
The time comes near when
page 48 of the Daily News
will report the death of the
last Pearl Harbor survivor,
the widow of the last
invader of Omaha Beach.
And like the once famous parts
of a nation's vocabulary -- Cold Harbor,
Seven Days, Round Top, Stonewall and Shiloh --
Anzio, Kasserine Pass, Willie and Joe,
the Bulge, the Hedge Rows, Saipan,
Tarawa, Ernie Pyle, Wake Island
will be relegated to the hobby warriors
and obscure find-a-nit historians
who write more accurately
since they were not there;
and that is as it should be:
it's the past; it's gone now.
Let the past be that.
Study it, respect it; learn from it.
Then let it be ...
the past.

[vessq]

Good afternoon Ross,

I assume this is meant for sharing and not posted seeking criticism of the poem.

My dad and all my uncles except one came in from the ranches and enlisted together. The one was rejected because the family was involved in agriculture. He was the oldest and supposedly they did not want to take all the sons off the farms and ranches.

The last, Wayne, died in his sleep last week.

Those of us who were little on December 7, 1941 ( I was I year and a few days old) learned what we know from those academics and historians you speak of and from a novels and movies.

My Dad, six uncles and four cousins all returned and said little. Our family lost no one.

Wayne served on an LST. My mother got him make a cassette tape of his life as he remembered it.

Here is how he covered the war, "Normandy, D-day + 2 ; nothing much happened. Towed to North Africa for repairs."

I never asked why, if nothing much happened, repairs were needed and he never said.

Thanks for the poem.

Vess

[Maggie]

Hi Ace,

Thanks for the thought-prevoking reminder on this Memorial Day!!!

Peggy

[mayo]

Thank you for posting this. I believe that we need to hear poems like this. We need to be reminded. In this instance ignorance is not bliss.

You do have one spelling mistake in L8. Small typo.

I want the past to stay past, but it is so hard to think in those terms when we still have soldiers at war around the world.

mayo

[Cleo_Serapis]

Ace,

this is so true! Thank you for posting this here for us to ponder. I simply admire all that you've packed into it. The ending is easier written and spoken than done, sadly.

Let the past be that.
Study it, respect it; learn from it.
Then let it be ...
the past.

I might add the word 'in' to that last line, and dont forget to fix that typo for 'invader'. Keeping things in the past instead of just 'the past' as you wish.

I enjoyed the shape of this as well, that surely must have taken a bit of effort and thought.

Well done,
~Cleo

[ace]

Vess:


Thank you for the read and the comment.

There's no question that this was both the high point (and in too many cases) the low point of my generations life. Quite a time!

Thanks again.


ace

[ace]

Peggy:

Thanks for the read. Guess thia is just part of "we won't forget".

ace

[Psyche]

Thanks for sharing, Ace. I'm not familiar with all the names -I'm Argentine- but I can relate to your poem very well indeed. My father's British family was lost in The Great War (I), young boys barely out of school dying in the trenches, shelled to bits...Somewhere in my various "memory boxes", I still have the gilt-edged cards sent to their parents, thanking the family for "services to King and Country", etc. No bodies to bury, nowhere to mark where they died. Some medals with ribbons. Lost "somewhere in France", that sort of thing....

Then W.W.II, same story... but it made more sense than W.W.I. My Dad was too young to fight, he came to Argentina penniless, having lost all his brothers and a sister, who drowned. There had been 7 of them.

"Lest we forget"... is what the British say.

Your finale is very good, tho' I've lost hope that humankind will ever learn from the past. Sorry, perhaps I'm just feeling bad about the Air France catastrophe... no words for that.

Syl***