A poem for Remembrance Sunday: truly to remember is a pledge to fight for peace

A VIRTUAL REMEMBRANCING

Remembrance means much more than 'not forgetting'.
Re-membering means the impossible piecing back together of
the fragments of lives taken, given (lost in either case);
the smithereens into which were blasted long ago
ancestral bodies, limbs, minds and, alas, whole nations.

Remembrance means a re-assembling after countless moments
when clocks stopped, threads snapped, breath ceased;
re-casting what remains into new patterns
where the meaning is no longer Death, Defeat, Destruction, Dross
and scars upon folk's faces, hearts or bomb-ploughed Mother Earth.

At the rising of the sun and at its going down we shall
re-member, then, those lives that grew not old,
those stories broken off unendedly too soon;
our task to dream the dreams they did not live to see
and kindle lights in new homes fit for long-forgotten heroes.

We, who cannot meet and by law may not assemble now,
we must re-draw ourselves to build, to be the wanting future of the dead,
fighting real and not confected foes: microbes, hunger, inequity and hate.
In the enforced solitude of this Re-membering Day,
a bugle makes its lonely call: let's gather all and virtually as one.

© Rob Esdaile, 07.11.20