Yesterday I took the coward’s way out and said nothing about ANZAC Day and the mindless jingoism that surrounds this faux commemoration. My news feed was filled with blood red poppies, sepia photographs of young men in uniform, long dead heroes smiling at the dead eyes of thousands of long-dead cameras. We deny the conversation we should be having by naming the long-dead as ‘my Grandad’ or ‘Uncle Hone’ or tagged with shut-the-fuck-up lines like ‘she lost three sons’.
All true, of course, but that’s not my beef.
My Dad had his number, I had mine. He was 10486. Mine is etched on the rim of my medals but I can’t, literally for the life of me, remember what it was. I’d have to go and check and that’s never going to happen on any ANZAC Day in my lifetime. I’ve never seen myself as a number. Ever. Lexie’s number plate. Lexie’s ticket to eternal health care. Lexie’s link to the IRD and the funeral home.
Instead of bugles, salutes and Rupert Brook I prefer to meditate on WB Yeats’ words from a different war and consider how ‘too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart’. I will remember my dad as he would have wanted me to remember him, rugged up in a long overcoat, green and black scarf, and the dark green trilby hat he always wore when stalking the sidelines at my schoolboy rugby games before cycling home alone across the city to working class Linwood and the state house that was our home. He was a justly proud man but not of his ‘service’. ‘There’s no honour in killing’ he would say ‘and even less in doing it for master’s for monetary and political gain’.
Cannon-fodder.
That’s all they were.
All we were.
Instead of the mindless ‘we will remember them’, let’s take time to think about the man from the motor registration department going home on the bus to his wife and kids whose deep nights echo with gunfire and dead boy’s cries, the wharfie up at sparrow-fart on his bike to the docks in all weathers to oil the wheels of an economy that he would never benefit from, and the shearer looking at his sullen blades as he eats a breakfast of doorstep mutton sandwiches and tries not to think about dead meat.
Real men.
Damaged men.
Men who were lied to, and we perpetuate those lies. On ANZAC Day.
EASTER 1916
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our wingèd horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute to minute they live;
The stone’s in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Thanks to Comrade Joe for the song, and to the Billy Bragg’s of the world for the reminder.
Have a listen to ‘Between the Wars’:
dykiegirl 