Remembrance — Martin

How do we remember what occurred long before we were born? Why should we? To me remembrance of the two world wars, is not necessarily synonymous with supporting our government’s involvement in Afghanistan, nor necessarily opposed to it. It is a consciousness of what happened, an attempt to understand why it happened, and an appreciation of those who risked their lives, and those who lost their lives.

Part of my remembrance is reflecting on the involvement of my father in WWII and my grandfather in WWI. Here is a poem which I wrote from the letters my grandfather wrote home to Canada during the 1914-1918 war. He was writing to a girl with whom a friendship was ripening into a romance. I am writing from the perspective of one who knows how the story ends. This poem comes from my collection, Poiema.

Censorship

She is so far away that his words take more than a month
to span the gap   Based on this equation I am more than 
800 times further away   down a one-way street
holding his words in their guarded   plastic sleeves

He must be careful what he says   Even an orderly 
in the ambulance corps needs to be censored
so he speaks in generalities   of their destination
& their activities   & of her brother with trench fever

The moon moving through the clouds 
sings of his loneliness   & of the girl on Princess Avenue
down whose sidewalk his mind freely moves
even though an ocean & a war block his way

He censors himself   for the blind ping pong of their 
relationship is like the image of a horse-drawn ambulance   
moving beyond a line of trees   though perhaps 
as unnerving & unpredictable as “Fritzy’s big guns”

Her most recent response is to something distant
& preliminary   She doesn’t know 
that after eighteen months he’s finally advanced 
through dangerous terrain to the word   love

A quarter of my genetic makeup is in the hand
that pens the words   & a quarter in the hand
that eagerly opens the envelope   & so I know 
in my bones what he can only hope

D.S. Martin is Music Critic for Christian Week. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca