Lights Out: Honour Through Life
As the lights go out over Britain to mark the centenary of the start of the Great War, we thank those men and women who lost their lives, so that we might have ours.
It is in their honour that we pray for an end to the war and bloodshed that still plagues our world. It is in their honour that we call for peace.
Honour Through Life
And so one hundred years have passed
Since the world’s youth was shipped out to foreign fields
Ploughed by bootless corpses,
Returning home in the form of dog tags
And memories,
Their spirits forever tethered to the barren wastelands
In which all life was emptied.
They painted street names in the trenches,
Playing house
On land they wouldn’t live long enough to set down roots on.
Trudging through those sodden slums,
Until they dropped to their knees, onto the weeping earth.
They spent their last moments
Fashioning death from the ochre clay,
With hands that should have been cradling new life.
Now, the shadows of those lost men
Stand watch over the graves we dig for our children,
The victims of endless bloodshed,
A tomb in which we bury our humanity.
They watch as we flounder
In the slackened hell of our own making,
Desperate for one sweet, glorious moment of lightness,
While we continue to cling to the ignominy of the cancerous night of war.
© Carly Dugmore
