Sunday 9 November 2014

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.

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