Tomorrow Is Tomorrow Is Tomorrow

(Veterans, Armistice, Remembrance Day)

 

Before, before, before

We’ve had war

We have it now

The great one did not end it

How we wish it had an ending

 

Now we are met

Eleven, eleven, eleven

Eighteen

In war, a number that has twice the meaning

 

And should we meet

We should remember

Forget the selling

To apply the real moment

 

An awful, unromantic time

And we tried the poets

Planes flew, pilots without parachutes

Holes in fabric hulls

Not-yet-synchronized guns

To shoot through propellers

Or set in peril upon wings,

Stronger than what held them up

In what became an unfree sky

 

Tanks inviting death

Outside and inside

Crews just as like to die from the machine

While combatants swing away

From an unbreathing, steel hull

 

Mustard gas that creeped into the soul

A cost was paid to use

Or to have it eat the lungs

Of enemies we no longer knew

A new indifference to war

On its satanic way to tested strategy

 

And in the trenches

Was there any glory

As the unknown war

Wore it away to dissolution

 

Not that there weren’t stalwarts

Loyalty to earn a heaven in a moment

 

The great war

And it was great

So the letters say

And the poets try us, still

And we go to them

For in the letters’ words and the poem-lines

There is truth

In faithfulness

To family at home

Timeworn or sudden friends who are next to us

Who will not last the campaign

Nor will we

 

C L Couch

 

 

(image)

A cross, left in Saint-Yves (Saint-Yvon – Ploegsteert; Comines-Warneton in Belgium) in 1999, to commemorate the site of the Christmas Truce. The text reads: “1914 – The Khaki Chum’s Christmas Truce – 1999 – 85 Years – Lest We Forget”