In Flander’s Fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses row on row
That mark our place while in the sky
The lark still bravely singing flies
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
It’s not raining and my feet aren’t slipping in half-frozen mud, but none-the-less, standing in the closest thing I have to a dress uniform, with my feet aching in my good shoes; the cenotaph is still the cenotaph.
When I was little I went to the ceremony because my Gran had decided we must go. It was a family thing, even though I remembered none of my family who had served in any war; except my Gran herself…who was a welder, and who used to say to me
When you’ve lived through two wars and a depression you can do what you want
And she was right. And I am glad – in some ways – that she is not here now to see what the world has come to.
Anyway, when I was little, I felt pretty and grown-up in my pretty clothes; I did not understand it, and if I cried it was likely because I was bored and everyone else was crying and perhaps I thought it was expected of me.
I would give a lot to have that bored naivety back.
As I’ve grown older I attended because I feel compelled to, although explaining why is…perhaps not always.
I go, and I cry because I all too often feel like the lark; still bravely trying to sing over the insane violence that is erupting all around her; all around us.
I cry because even now – perhaps especially now – I do not understand it. Do not understand why every year the list gets longer, why I am still watching friends salute wreathes and choke out names that are not more than a few years gone, why there are more names instead of fewer. Why must people die in the name of freedom? Freedom is a concept created by mankind, no other animal, no other creature, has any concept of freedom – for no other species has a concept of slavery. We created that, all by ourselves, we fight for and against our own creation. How many more people have to perish before we finally learn some kind of a lesson? How many other little girls have to stand in the mud in party shoes, crying for something they do not understand, for Grandmother’s lost and fathers vanished..
Why? Why do we simply never bloody learn?
I stood there, weeping silently in confusion and sorrow and fear, I thought of my Gran, my high school classmates who serve, my colleagues from the military base where I was once a secretary.
It all seems so pointless, year after year, more lives, more hearts broken, more children clinging to hands in the cold looking at weeping angels and lists of names…and never any lessons learned.
When I weep, I truly weep, I make almost no sound. You have to look at my face to see tears. People seldom do. My manager – of all people – did. Walking up beside me without a word, he wrapped and arm through mine and his in mine and held on until I let go.
I explained to him later: I cry because I think, deep down, I am still that little girl in the rain…weeping because no one can explain to her “why”.