Favourite Remembrance day poetry

[Fakeflowersaremynewnormal]

Coming up to remembrance day tomorrow, what are your favourite remembrance or war poems or song lyrics? Not sure if like is the correct word but the famous poem by Wilfred Owen is very powerful.

Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime ...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

I have a rendezvous with death (Seeger) obviously, not for reading at a service, but as WW1 poetry.

I also love Strange Meeting (Owen)

Both make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

I must have over a dozen anthologies of war poetry on my shelves (not just WW1): I love The Burial of Sir John Moore after Coruna -"we left him alone with his glory". And it was Charge of the Light Brigade that switched me on to poetry in the first place at primary school.

In Flanders Fields by John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

I found the text of one of the poems Hefzi chose, so tragic yet beautiful:

Rendezvous

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air -
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath -
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear . . .
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

Alan Seeger

Futility by Wilfred Owen

was it for this the clay grew tall?

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57283/futility-56d23aa2d4b57

Thanks, OP - I'm on my phone and the cutting and pasting wasn't working for multiple lines

I like all the other poems posted so far also - though I always think that the final bit of Macrae's is ever so slightly chilling.

I also like the Kipling one "If any ask us why we died/Tell them: because our fathers' lied" - there's meant to be a dual meaning there, as he lied to support his son signing up although he was too young. There was a beautiful TV drama about it a few years ago - called something like "My son John", I think. Kipling never managed to forgive himself for what he saw as his role in his son's death

Reported Missing by Anna Gordon Keown:

Reported Missing

My thought shall never be that you are dead:
Who laughed so lately in this quiet place.
The dear and deep-eyed humour of that face
Held something ever living, in Death’s stead.
Scornful I hear the flat things they have said
And all their piteous platitudes of pain.
I laugh! I laugh! – For you will come again –
This heart would never beat if you were dead.

The world’s adrowse in twilight hushfulness,
There’s purple lilac in your little room,
And somewhere out beyond the evening gloom
Small boys are culling summer watercress.
Of these familiar things I have no dread
Being so very sure you are not dead.

Oh, that's beautiful, Roly: I hadn't heard that before

I love a little collection of poetry called The Not Dead by Simon Armitage. The documentary on YouTube is well worth the time spent watching it - so moving. Here's one of the poems:

"The Malaya Emergency"

One road in, one road out.
A world away from a bricklayer's yard,
from Manchester's oily ship canal
to a tented camp on a river bank.
River runs deep. River runs dank.

One road there, one road back.
Leaf-light dapples a mountain track.
Then all-out attack
Buds like bullets, flowers like flack.
River runs thick, river runs fast.

Me and Lomas and Polish John.
We sat and thought.
Whispered and smoked.
Men without rank, men on their own.
One road out, one road home...

so we drove back into the killing zone,
just drove right into the killing zone,
river still rolling, turning its stones,
mates I'd drank and laughed and joked with,
mates I'd effed and jeffed and smoked with,
butchered now and their shirts are burning,
river still writhing, river still turning.

Joe with his eye shot out of his head,
(He'll live for now but meet his end
in a Manchester doorway, begging for bread),
river runs black, river runs red,
some boy wailing his mother's name,
Tommy asleep with a hole in his brain...
I found his killer and shot him dead,
tossed him onto a barbed wire fence,
taught him a lesson, left him to rot.

Job done.
Till thirty years on,
when the dead, like the drowned, float up to top.

One road out, one road in.
And all for what--rubber and tin.
A can of beans, a bicycle tyre.
A river in flames, a river on fire.
A bicycle tyre and a can of beans
and a river that streams and streams and streams.

Lamplight by May Wedderburn Cannen

We planned to shake the world together, you and I.
Being young, and very wise;
Now in the light of the green shaded lamp
Almost I see your eyes
Light with the old gay laughter; you and I
Dreamed greatly of an Empire in those days,
Setting our feet upon laborious ways,
And all you asked of fame
Was crossed swords in the Army List;
My Dear, against your name.

We planned a great Empire together, you and I,
Bound only by the sea;
Now in the quiet of a chill Winter's night
Your voice comes hushed to me
Full of forgotten memories: you and I
Dreamed great dreams of our future in those days,
Setting our feet on undiscovered ways,
And all I asked of fame
A scarlet cross on my breast, my Dear,
For the swords by your name.

We shall never shake the world together, you and I,
For you gave your life away;
And I think my heart was broken by war,
Since on a summer day
You took the road we never spoke of; you and I
Dreamed greatly of an Empire in those days;
You set your feet upon the Western ways
And have no need of fame -
There's a scarlet cross on my breast, my Dear,
And a torn cross with your name.

Suicide in the Trenches by Siegfried Sasson

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,

With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

My boy Jack by Rudyard Kipling

Probably because I'm afraid my son will follow his father into the army. Kipling's poem of loss and the lines where he tries to comfort himself with a father's pride seem like they are not quite enough and he's willing himself to be consoled when he can't ever be.

Sorry should have posted it

“Have you news of my boy Jack? ”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Has any one else had word of him?”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind—
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

Thanks for posting your poems they are all so heart wrenching.
I have been wondering why WW1 produced so many more well known poems than WW2, maybe the different nature of the conflict? I was reading about Alun Lewis who was considered one of the best war poets of WW2, he did not cope well with military life and died probably at his own hand in 1944. This poem was about the frustrations of training camp.

All day it has rained

All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors
Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,
Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground
And from the first grey wakening we have found
No refuge from the skirmishing fine rain
And the wind that made the canvas heave and flap
And the taut wet guy-ropes ravel out and snap.
All day the rain has glided, wave and mist and dream,
Drenching the gorse and heather, a gossamer stream
Too light to stir the acorns that suddenly
Snatched from their cups by the wild south-westerly
Pattered against the tent and our upturned dreaming faces.
And we stretched out, unbuttoning our braces,
Smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks,
Reading the Sunday papers - I saw a fox
And mentioned it in the note I scribbled home; -
And we talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome,

And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities
Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees;

As of ourselves or those whom we
For years have loved, and will again
Tomorrow maybe love; but now it is the rain
Possesses us entirely, the twilight and the rain.

And I can remember nothing dearer or more to my heart
Than the children I watched in the woods on Saturday
Shaking down burning chestnuts for the schoolyard's merry play,
Or the shaggy patient dog who followed me
By Sheet and Steep and up the wooded scree
To the Shoulder o' Mutton where Edward Thomas brooded long
On death and beauty - till a bullet stopped his song.

by Alun Lewis

As they drifted on their path
There was silence deep as death
As the boldest held his breath
For a time

Also The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.