Ekphrastic Poem: “So They Can Remember”
View at Mimizan, by Winston Churchill (UK) 1920
This poem was a #Rejected submission to the writing challenge here: https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic-writing-challenges/ekphrastic-writing-responses-winston-churchill
So They Can Remember
“How?” I breathe.
Nothing, nothing is the same–
Much less me.
How the deuce can this be
Just as I remembered?
Those memories had seemed
As though they were something dreamt–
A world I had once imagined.
How, when everything has been diced,
Reimagined, destroyed, negotiated–
How did anything stay the same?
The trees still stand upright, healthy and slender, (and whole?)
Growing towards a gentle sun.
The trees–my God, they still stand.
Not plowed down by gunfire.
Not bent over in cries of agony
as limbs crack,
life gushes to the soil,
breath returns to their Creator.
The water–how has it not turned red
With the blood of nations?
How is it not churned up with the bow
of sub,
carrier, and
landing parties?
The air–it’s so quiet. Not inflamed
With the scream of raid sirens
Or the dying cries of men directed to a
Sky that only replies in the thunder of planes.
This silence–how is it broken only by
the song of bird and
gentle lapping of waves?
After the piercing tone of
detonating mortars and the
roar of the blood pumping in one’s own ears?
These hands…
These hands have shaken the hands of dignitaries,
both good and evil men
or, more aptly,
men who are both good and evil–
We the commanders ordering others into the fight.
My hands have shaken those of the bereaved–
fathers, dignified and standing straight but unable to breathe,
mothers, inconsolable and doubled over with grief,
wives holding their now fatherless babes–
All bereft because of the orders these hands have penned.
“The war to end all wars” it’s been called
And, my God, I dearly hope they’re right.
Was the price worth it?
Did we not have to answer the call of right and freedom?
Or did those banners get muddied along the way?
Here, on the other side of that hell,
Must be paradise...right?
After the world has paid such a hefty price
I must believe there can only be light after this.
As we lay down implements of war
Our hands are free to pick up tools of art,
And craft a new world–one we wish to see–
And I, too, will again play my part.
These hands.
These same hands will paint the unchanging truth
“As within, so without…”
For the collective can only mirror outwardly
That which we see with the inner eye.
Verily, there is ever within each and every one of us
an untouched place—
aye, an untouchable place—
of beauty, calm, love, and song.
I will paint so they can remember.