Remembrance Day is, for most of us, a day on which all who have died through armed conflict are remembered, wherever they may have fallen, and whichever nation they belonged to. Poetry has always made an outstanding contribution to reflecting on the waste of war, going way back. This by Aeschylus 525 - 456 BC struck me because it is so ancient - a time when the popular perception is that war was always glorified.
http://www.blackcatpoems.com/a/the_price_of_war.html

In the run-up to Thursday, would anyone else like to share a link to a poem about war which means a lot to them, or which has particularly struck them?

This has always been my favourite war poem. I remember reading it at school and thinking I have to commit that to memory and can still recite it now although I can't manage any of my own! -

http://pladju.co.uk/poems/poemsongofthedyinggunner.htm

I'm so glad that you like Charles Causely, Win. He's one of my faves too! And of course he's from the county where I live. The first line about the stars is so wonderful! I think I agree with your choice. x

Dead Man's Dump

The plunging limbers over the shattered track
Racketed with their rusty freight,
Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,
And the rusty stakes like sceptres old
To stay the flood of brutish men
Upon our brothers dear.

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead
But pained them not, though their bones crunched,
Their shut mouths made no moan.
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,
Man born of man, and born of woman,
And shells go crying over them
From night till night and now.

Earth has waited for them,
All the time of their growth
Fretting for their decay:
Now she has them at last!
In the strength of their strength
Suspended--stopped and held.

What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?
Earth! have they gone into you!
Somewhere they must have gone,
And flung on your hard back
Is their soul's sack
Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.
Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass,
Or stood aside for the half used life to pass
Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,
When the swift iron burning bee
Drained the wild honey of their youth.

What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre,
Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,
Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,
Immortal seeming ever?
Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,
A fear may choke in our veins
And the startled blood may stop.

The air is loud with death,
The dark air spurts with fire,
The explosions ceaseless are.
Timelessly now, some minutes past,
Those dead strode time with vigorous life,
Till the shrapnel called `An end!'
But not to all. In bleeding pangs
Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,
Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.

Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel
Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love,
The impetuous storm of savage love.
Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in chemic smoke,
What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul
With lightning and thunder from your mined heart,
Which man's self dug, and his blind fingers loosed?

A man's brains splattered on
A stretcher-bearer's face;
His shook shoulders slipped their load,
But when they bent to look again
The drowning soul was sunk too deep
For human tenderness.

They left this dead with the older dead,
Stretched at the cross roads.

Burnt black by strange decay
Their sinister faces lie,
The lid over each eye,
The grass and coloured clay
More motion have than they,
Joined to the great sunk silences.

Here is one not long dead;
His dark hearing caught our far wheels,
And the choked soul stretched weak hands
To reach the living word the far wheels said,
The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light,
Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels
Swift for the end to break
Or the wheels to break,
Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight.

Will they come? Will they ever come?
Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,
The quivering-bellied mules,
And the rushing wheels all mixed
With his tortured upturned sight.
So we crashed round the bend,
We heard his weak scream,
We heard his very last sound,
And our wheels grazed his dead face.

Isaac Rosenberg

I think the couplet 'When the swift iron burning bee
Drained the wild honey of their youth.' is just stunning. I was about 15 when I first read that poem and it did, in its own strange way, change my life. I'm pretty certain I would never have tried to write a poem one day if I'd not been so moved by it.

I visited the Dardanelles (where my Great Uncle is buried) earlier this year and I took that poem with me.

Jxxx

I'm not that well versed in war poetry but Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth always stood out to me at school.

'And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds' struck me as a tender and powerful way to end a poem which also deals with grief.

3 exceptional poems. Thank you Win, John and Izz.

Anthem for Doomed Youth is at

http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen2.html

I know this is not a poem but Lavinia Murray's (Moxy) Radio 4 play is bang on the button in terms of reporting the horrors of war - from 1993 in Europe!
Superbly written with an understatement of tone that belies the quotidian horror of those affected, whose lives are painted not just by the artist whose reportage forms the narration of this piece, but by the poetry - the spareness - of Lavinia's writing. I recommend this for anyone interested in writing on war. Perhaps someone could compose a poem from her broadcasts? Every day this week, a 14 minute piece available on listen again: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vspd3

It's a pity Moxy's profile isn't live at the moment. I'd have liked to congratulate her. What a remarkable and vivid series this was, though it's totally understandable that she found it very difficult. She (and David Rowlands) managed to focus on humanity in the middle of savagery, horror and continual tension.

Thank you ever so much Dave and Julian.Your comments are very gratefully appreciated. It was a very, very tough call to write -- David was extremely brave to put himself -- voluntarily -- through the horror. Having the presence of mind to jot down his experiences was also quite a feat. His attention to detail was, of course, essential for his paintings and added a potent veracity to the dramatisation.
Having to research around the events and imagine moments that sometimes only had a couple of sentences outlining them, well, it was gruelling. Reading up on the history of the 'Balkans' was, likewise, deeply troubling and unsettling. So much toxic politics -- centuries of it, really.. I thought this was a very important story to tell. Again, thank you so much for listening and taking the time and trouble to comment. It does make the graft (and the nightmares) worthwhile. Moxy xx