I heard the news over the weekend that the President had decided to declare the war in Iraq officially over and was in the process of removing all troops from the area.
The thought of our troops coming home brought to mind all the men and women who would not be returning and I decided to visit the local Veteran's Memorial Wall. As usual, click each photo for a better view.
What I find particularly poignant about this wall and the one in Washington is the list of names. So often we think of wars in grand scale but somehow forget the individual who was a son, a daughter, a father, or a brother. Here was a chance to reflect person by person, to really see the human cost of war.
I stood for a moment and just touched the carved names of people I would never know personally, but in my own way wanted to honor. Touching the names somehow gave them life and helped me imagined them alive and vibrant.
My hope for the future is that each family connected with those names somehow finds peace in knowing that their relative meant something to someone who just wanted to stop for a moment and remember them as they lived. Someone who prays that we will study war no more...
You're so right, Cherrie ! We can always dream of a world without war, knowing that this will never happen, but we can still hope and do our best to prevent conflicts such as WW II to happen again. As a British poet, Cecil Day-Lewis, once wrote in his poem "The Nabara" describing the Spanish Civil War as "a battle between light and darkness" :
ReplyDelete"Freedom is more than a word, more than the
base coinage
Of statesmen, the tyrant's dishonoured cheque,
or the dreamer's mad
Inflated currency. She is mortal, we know,
and made
In the image of simple men who have no taste
for carnage
But sooner kill and are killed than see the
image betrayed."
I just found a poem by C. Day-Lewis a stanza of which is engraved on his gravestone and reads as follows :
ReplyDelete"Shall I be gone long ?
For ever and a day.
To whom there belong?
Ask the stone to say,
Ask my song."
Have a good day, Cherrie.
JLBO,
ReplyDeleteI think you said it quite eloquently!