Today, 11th November 2018, is seeing an unbelievable amount of “remembrance” focussing on the end of the First World War. The papers, the radio, the TV are full of it. People have bought millions of plastic poppies. People have hand-made, even knitted, millions of poppies. Locally there is a village with giant poppies, maybe 40cms across, on nearly every lamp post! The poppy factory, for the first time ever, went on to 24 hour working to meet demand. WHY? WHY? The answers so often given are thoughtless parotting of platitudes, cliches, half truths, untruths, mistaken readings of history, hypocrisy and sentimental wallowing in the tragedy of a war which no-one alive today remembers and few have any grasp of the historical facts of it. This is not what remembrance is about.
Meanwhile the wars of our lifetime and the servicemen, alive today (with many suffering), are given hardly a mention.
In this book, Remembrance Poems and Readings, is an explanation of the true meaning of remembrance, a brief history of remembrance, traditional remembrance statements and poems, and prayers, and many deeply thoughtful, forward looking and insightful poems by contemporary servicemen and others. Two mayors of Hiroshima, the city that was bombed with a nuclear bomb in 1945, commemorate the occasion of their city’s destruction with humane and positive messages.
