Those who object to personalized drivel please stop reading now….

November 11 being a day of remembering, I recently took to recalling this day in my personal history. My earliest recollections of the occasion are of, as a child, walking hand in hand with my bemedalled and oddly serene father on bleak, cold, sometimes snowy November days to the town cenotaph for Remembrance Day services.
The sense of atmosphere of those revisited days triggered a flood of memories like the advance of a Battalion of dead dry leaves before a chill November breeze, hastened by the call of pipes and bugles.
And hence I write the following random thoughts and observations from the eyes and imagination of that child:



Cenotaph

Sentries guard this place.
Stone soldiers. Motionless. Lifeless,
yet no soul rests here.
it is for us they stand watch,
the living.

These grey men had counterparts once.
Men who moved
in a world of black and white.
we have seen their pictures,
perpetually young.
heard their names whispered
by old women.

whispered by frail men
in ill fitting clothes.
the garb of ancient victors.
weeping like the vanquished.
grey as statues.

This place bears the echoes of ghosts.
A place of remembering
where we the living stop.
and speak words to the silence.
and all the words are one word.

Why.

And the sentries guard this place
Like stone gods.
Motionless. Lifeless.