Remembrance Day 2017

   Remembrance day is a day that I hold dear in my heart. It is a day where I reflect on how History sets the tone for today and how it affects generation after generation. I think about my grandfathers and great grandfathers and their choices in regards to their children's and grandchildren's and so forths freedoms in all they gave of themselves, their sacrifices for future generations, as they were great.

  I thought I'd copy out a poem in a book I have from my grandparent's home. It is called "A Canadian Twilight' and the poem I am writing out is by Bernard Freeman Trotter. This specific poem is written just before he was killed in action in France in May of 1917. His parents received this poem from him in a letter the day after he was killed. It is powerful and its' message is vital. There was extreme sacrifice made for you and I. It does not matter how many years ago it was ~  The price payed on battlefields and in the millions of souls that gave up all their dreams, their innocence, all they had, for me ~ for you is one that is never repayable! However if you read this poem the writer knew that even those who fought would (after the war) move forward in a sense and become 'effaced by later failure, sloth, or sin.'

  I think the best way we can repay this supreme sacrifice made on each of our behalves is to live a life where we extend kindness and helpfulness and love to everyone we possibly can, and to never take our freedom forgranted. I know this has been said time and time again but each November 11th for me is like a reset to try to hold this closer and to live in remembrance. Here is the poem.

 

"ICI Repose"

A little cross of weather -silvered wood,
Hung with a garish wreath of tinselled wire
And on it carved a legend - thus it runs:
"ICI Repose ~" Add what name you will,
And multiply by thousands: in the fields,
Along the roads, beneath the trees, one here,
A dozen there, to each its simple tale
of one more jewel threaded star like on
The sacrificial rosary of France

And as I read and read again those words,
Those simple words, they took a mystic sense;
And from the glamour of an alien tongue
They wove insistent music in my brain,
Which, in a twilight hour, when all the guns
Were silent, shaped itself to song.

O happy dead! who sleep embalmed in glory,
Safe from corruption, purified by fire,
Ask you our pity? ours, mud grimed and gory,
Who still must grimly strive, grimly desire?

You have outrun the reach of our endeavour,

Have flown beyond our most exalted quest, -

Who prate of Faith and Freedom, knowing ever

That all we really fight for's just -a rest,

The rest that only Victory can bring us -

Or Death, which throws us brother like by you -

The civil commonplace in which 'twill fling us

To neutralize our then too marital hue.

But you have rest from every tribulation

Even in the midst of war; you sleep serene,

Pinnacled on the sorrow of a nation,

In cerements of sacrificial sheen.

Oblivion cannot claim you: our heroic

War-lustred moment, as our youth, will pass 

To swell the dusty hoard of Time the Stoic,

That gathers cobwebs in the nether glass.

We shall grow old, and tainted with the rotten

Effluvia of the peace we fought to win,

The bright deeds of our youth will be forgotten,

Effaced by later failure, sloth, or sin;

But you have conquered Time, and sleep forever, 

Like gods, with a white halo on your brows-

Your Souls our lode-stars, your death-crowned endeavour

The spur that holds the nations to their vows.