This
year's poppy was grabbed by the wind and blew from my shoulder across
the driveway. It lodged in tall grass in the neighbour's field,
buried under pellets of snow. My efforts to retrieve it failed.
Grieving my poppy, needing ritual on this cold November day, I
returned forlorn to my empty house. I scanned the radio to find a
service, the television for the wreath-laying from Ottawa. I turned
at last to the piano and my stiff fingers stumbled through:
O
valiant hearts who to your glory came
Through
dust of conflict and through battle flame . . .
Old Dave
Mason used to bring the poppies to school every year to sell to us
there. Wearing his Legion blazer and crooked beret like my dad.
Walking with an old soldier's pride. His eyes were watery; his ears
were shot; his hands trembled as he pinned the poppies to me. On the
last year that I saw him there, when he asked me about my trip to
Quebec, I told him how much I had loved Montreal. He had not liked it
one bit, he said. “They made us march,” he said, “from Union
Station to the other depot. I didn't like it at all!”
“Was
that on your way to France?”
“No,”
he said. “On our way to South Africa.” France had been later. I
reached to touch his hand that day—this man who, as a teenager
younger than I, had fought in the Boer War, and again, as a young
man, in Europe.
Proudly
you gathered rank on rank to war
As who
had heard God's message from afar
All you
had hoped for, all you had you gave
To save
mankind, yourself you scorned to save.
Dave and
my dad were in different wars but in many ways their experiences were
similar. Rank on rank. The troop ships. The different campaigns and
battles. They respected each other. They knew things that the rest
of us did not know, and they tried to protect us from those
horrors—to shield us from stories of inhuman deeds and shattered
wasted lives. They never questioned their own participation when the
winds of war had howled. And every year they pinned their medals to
their shoulders and marched with the ghosts of their comrades who had
not returned. As Dad read out each name on the Roll Call of the Dead,
Old Dave's failing hands pinned a poppy to the white Celtic cross
until it stood at last blood red.
Splendid
you passed, the great surrender made;
Into
the light that nevermore shall fade;
Deep
your contentment in that blest abode,
Who
wait the last clear trumpet call of God.
“Let
us ree-member,” Dad said, as if by remembering, we could put the
pieces together again. Before the bugle sounded, grown men wept. And
row on row of children with poppies on their shoulders, in silence,
listened to the cold wind blow.
(Words to the hymn “O Valiant Hearts” by Sir John Stanhope Arkwright.)
I wrote this piece several years ago and included it in my self-published chapbook Circles of Light. I still attend Remembrance Day services, every November 11, rain, snow, or shine. jmb
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