Landscape

Writing for Remembrance Sunday 2014

Still quiet subdued colours

Of a November Day.

How did humans choose to end

Their war in November,

My month?

My day is the first

Of this month,

All Saint’s Day

My birthday and Remembrance Sunday

Both remember the many

And not the select few.

My written view

Is that of the many

Moving off to War.

Below me is the railway

Along which many travelled

Never to return.

They made their unknowing

Last Journey.

Up the hill is the track

Of Hadrian’s Wall

Where violent civilised men

Defined a line between

Barbarians and Empire.

A border which my poetic hero

Of borders and living on the other side

W. H. Auden utterly understood,

He who did his best to circumvent

World War Two

But lived through

World War One

And went to the

Sino Japanese and

Spanish Civil Wars.

He who used the Pennine metaphor

To understand the Human Condition.

John Taverner’s “Fragments of a Prayer”

Plays from “Children of Men”

A future fantasy of triumph in defeat

Ever the Christian Story.

Our celebration this

Remembrance Sunday

Is unique.  Two of the church’s

Teenage children will be

Baptised this afternoon.

Jesus Christ will not be defeated.

One of those children is my daughter.

We stare death in the face and live.

That is our Gospel.