Sunday, November 10, 2013

Prompt # 11 - Service

Prompt # 11 - Service



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.)

1 comment:

  1. 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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