Remembering on All Souls

Holy Trinity Dunoon: All Souls

This evening we remembered. We lit candles in front of the altar for family and friends lost. We considered our mortality, and our human response to it. We were reminded how faith and raw emotion can make difficult bedfellows. And I remembered a poem I wrote over a decade ago.

Communicating

Today I would have phoned -
wished to share the small
details of my life, the
safe return, the laughing
at the rain which fell
as if the Flood would come.
But had I rung the number
as familiar as my name
you would not be there.
A stranger’s voice would say
your words, and the strangeness
would be too much to bear.
And contemplating this
a glacial shifting in my soul
gave promise that in weeks not lived
the frozen tears would find the way
and spill into a distant sea like
drops into the ocean of my love.

C.M.M. 4/05

November - a poem for the season of remembrance

NOVEMBER

The month of remembering -

the lines of men in the stubble fields

the hideous scramble over a muddy

parapet, the cringing death in the

eye’s blink - this month recalls

wars past and wars still trailing

death and mutilation in their wake.

But not just that.

This month of remembering 

lines up before our wavering prayers

the souls of Saints, the souls

of our beloved dead, guttering

like candles in the fitful 

illumination of our faith.

The tears come, yes - 

but do we weep for them, or do we

shrink at the sudden blinding glimpse

of our too frail mortality?

We who live trudge on to where

our companion dead are waiting

among the red flowers at the years’ end

in that land to which we go.

©C.M.M. 11/14

This owes its conclusion to a fraction of an idea from R.S.Thomas, whose words tend to haunt my subconscious and of whom I will always be in awe.

Normandy Landing

From heroic effort to the pathos

of the broken dead, a child’s toy
abandoned in the road, is only
a single step into randomness.
Why this one, who leapt so fearless
in the surf, why was he
destroyed and swallowed in the 
red tide, he and not the next
who followed and prevailed?
These men at once machine and 
vulnerable flesh cut off
from life and love and being young
now lie in rows too numberless for thought -
no randomness allowed in this, the 
garden of the lost. No laughter now, 
no language to describe
the lives that made them friend or foe, 
but the differentiated dead
are still beneath the plaque or cross
of those who held and those who came
and we now walk these quiet parks
and think upon the unlived years.
I am the child you never had, 
my son, and weep a mother’s tears.


© C.M.M

I wrote this in the garden of the Chatêau de Molay after our visit to Omaha Beach. The hideous futility of training, travelling halfway across the world from some deep Western state of America to die the moment the landing craft dropped its ramp - all that made a deep impression, as did the serried ranks of graves on the cliffs above the shore.

Remembering stories

This was where my parents had reached that evening...

I've been reading Rev Ruth's remembrance memories (if that's not tautologous) and found some of the memories that were part of my childhood flooding back. I was born just after the last World War ended, as anyone who's followed my father's Wartime Letters will know, so the memories are not my own, but they were among the first stories I ever heard. Stories, for example, of a time when, because they'd heard the All Clear and it was a beautiful evening, my parents went for a walk up Novar Drive in Glasgow. Just as they reached the top of the hill, the sirens sounded again and shrapnel began falling all around them. They clutched their tin hats to their heads and ran, apparently, laughing at the horror of it, back to their flat. This was a top flat in a red sandstone tenement, and their custom was to sit out the raids in the lobby press which protected them from flying glass (it was windowless) but precious little else. My mother calmed her nerves by doing the crosswords in old copies of the Glasgow Herald which were stashed in the cupboard, and her stomach with Rennies.

The rest of the inhabitants of 66 Novar Drive apparently congregated in the same cupboard of the bottom flat, four floors beneath them. History does not relate how they reacted my my father's assurance that they were all doomed there because if the building collapsed my mother's piano - now mine - would land on their heads and crush them all. (There is a full account of the worst action to hit Hyndland here.)

Tales like this, and that of the woman found carting her front windows out in two buckets and telling them that she now had a diamond-studded piano, made it all sound somehow exciting to a small child, but even then I could sense the horror of my mother's lone vigil in that same house after my father had gone overseas with the RAF, to live in a tiny tent in the Western Desert. Her own parents lived only 10 minutes' walk away, and she often stayed with them, but every now and again had to return home to look after it and ensure that it wasn't requisitioned for rehousing in her absence.

When the war was still a recent memory and the gap sites from demolished buildings still somewhere to play and the underground air-raid shelters even better, I used to wonder how anyone coped with being normal while it went on. I still wonder - just as I wonder how the families of serving soldiers do today. I think they were made of stern stuff, my parents - and I can't help thinking their life together after it was all over must have been an unthinkable joy for them.

And that's worth remembering too.

To see the object

There's a poem over on frankenstina which I wrote a while ago while thinking about a friend who had died. However, it seems to have become as much a meditation on faith, for that is how it communicated with several people who were unaware of the original stimulus.

An interesting exercise in "seeing the object as in itself it really is": my first essay in Ordinary English at University dealt with the necessity of considering only the text and not muddying the waters with background information. I don't think I wrote a very good essay ...