Post by spence on Nov 11, 2024 13:15:42 GMT -7
Every Armistice Day I read a poem written by a trout fishing friend, Dr. R. H. Miller, professor of English at University of Louisville. It always touches me. I'll share it.
Spence
ARMISTICE DAY 1974
For Ralph Clifton Partee
“A harmless young shepherd in a soldier’s coat-”
Edmund Blunden
Six-thirty. A cold November drizzle
Rattles on the windows.
The old man bends over the table,
Dim eyes peering through thick glasses.
He shuffles a mangled egg onto his plate,
Its yolk pale yellow and hard.
I touch him. He smiles.
He knows failure when he sees it.
His guttural words roll out like gravel down a chute,
Taking me back for the hundredth time
To the Argonne Forest, Chateau Thierry, Belleau Wood.
My mumbles thump on leather eardrums.
He tells me how his life
Crumbled in his hands like cool loam.
He talks of angry days spent
Mucking through human filth to fix pipes
Under the houses of rich, affable farmers
Who forget or refuse to pay him.
But who never fail to be neighborly.
Then, like a redbone hot on the scent
His mind tracks its way back to the Great War.
He mentions Flanders. I ask him, did he know
The boys in Flanders are buried in mass graves,
The crosses row on row are a deception?
My words pierce him like bullets, but he plods forward.
He tells me congress has made Armistice Day
A moveable holiday.
I say I know.
His eyes glisten, his voice rises and clears:
“Young Francis Rath--
Lived down the road here-just a kid-
First day we hit the trenches
I saw him, early in the morning,
Swinging his rifle like a new toy.
By noon he was dead, his heart blown away.
When we carried him back I saw the rest of them,
Nothing but arms, legs stuck up in the mud-
Nobody’d taught them how to die
But they were quick enough to do it.
The boys laying over there in Flanders Field
Made our Armistice Day.
It wasn’t this country.
They made a day of their own, so they can
Drive to hell and back in a weekend,
Hear some silly bastard croon the Star-Spangled Banner.
Francis Rath didn’t die for them,
He died for me,
And I’d have died for him.
He was all that mattered then
And all that matters now.”
Trembling, with a smirk, he turns
To the clotted egg, the cold toast and tea.
I look at him and know
That in this quiet kitchen
He has found the words at last
To make me feel the wounds he bleeds from.
My hand rests on his arm.
Outside a raw sun struggles
To rise through the morning rain.
Note: Pvt. Francis T. Rath, Defiance Co., Ohio, no. 2899320, Co. C, 127th Infantry. Died of wounds in the Meuse-Argonne on either October 10 or 18, 1918. Interred August 1, 1921 in Arlington National Cemetery, Section 18, Grave 2013.
“That these dead bones may live.”
Spence
ARMISTICE DAY 1974
For Ralph Clifton Partee
“A harmless young shepherd in a soldier’s coat-”
Edmund Blunden
Six-thirty. A cold November drizzle
Rattles on the windows.
The old man bends over the table,
Dim eyes peering through thick glasses.
He shuffles a mangled egg onto his plate,
Its yolk pale yellow and hard.
I touch him. He smiles.
He knows failure when he sees it.
His guttural words roll out like gravel down a chute,
Taking me back for the hundredth time
To the Argonne Forest, Chateau Thierry, Belleau Wood.
My mumbles thump on leather eardrums.
He tells me how his life
Crumbled in his hands like cool loam.
He talks of angry days spent
Mucking through human filth to fix pipes
Under the houses of rich, affable farmers
Who forget or refuse to pay him.
But who never fail to be neighborly.
Then, like a redbone hot on the scent
His mind tracks its way back to the Great War.
He mentions Flanders. I ask him, did he know
The boys in Flanders are buried in mass graves,
The crosses row on row are a deception?
My words pierce him like bullets, but he plods forward.
He tells me congress has made Armistice Day
A moveable holiday.
I say I know.
His eyes glisten, his voice rises and clears:
“Young Francis Rath--
Lived down the road here-just a kid-
First day we hit the trenches
I saw him, early in the morning,
Swinging his rifle like a new toy.
By noon he was dead, his heart blown away.
When we carried him back I saw the rest of them,
Nothing but arms, legs stuck up in the mud-
Nobody’d taught them how to die
But they were quick enough to do it.
The boys laying over there in Flanders Field
Made our Armistice Day.
It wasn’t this country.
They made a day of their own, so they can
Drive to hell and back in a weekend,
Hear some silly bastard croon the Star-Spangled Banner.
Francis Rath didn’t die for them,
He died for me,
And I’d have died for him.
He was all that mattered then
And all that matters now.”
Trembling, with a smirk, he turns
To the clotted egg, the cold toast and tea.
I look at him and know
That in this quiet kitchen
He has found the words at last
To make me feel the wounds he bleeds from.
My hand rests on his arm.
Outside a raw sun struggles
To rise through the morning rain.
Note: Pvt. Francis T. Rath, Defiance Co., Ohio, no. 2899320, Co. C, 127th Infantry. Died of wounds in the Meuse-Argonne on either October 10 or 18, 1918. Interred August 1, 1921 in Arlington National Cemetery, Section 18, Grave 2013.
“That these dead bones may live.”