Remembrance Day

Not that it is not enough – to remember; it is too much.

The family picnics in Normandy many years after the first Great War when we remembered sitting around craters – shell holes – yes, they hadn’t filled them in but the mud had turned into grass with time.

The Menin Gate at Ypres with its thousands of names of Canadian dead among too many others; Long lists imprinted in the mind of a child of seven, how much more deeply engraved for the parents.

Massed graves in Leningrad; quiet, say no more.

Remember the Vietnamese woman attempting to save her child. They shot her in the spine. She died. but not before living the shrieking agony of all past tortures through the inquisition up to this day. You can’t forget that woman – embedded in time and in mind. That was the time which brought me the question: “If You’d asked me…”

Who is God if it is not ourselves that must do Hir work

D. P., 11 November 1991