Memorial Day musings
What better place than a garden to visit on Memorial Day?
Battlefield deaths, no matter the uniform or creed or cause, have long been associated with flowers and fields of green beneath which the glorious dead are buried.
“In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row”
So we went today to Peninsula Park in Northeast Portland, where a wondrous rose garden awaits.
Not the more famous Portland International Rose Test Garden on the West Side of town, but equally enchanting, if not more so, because more intimate and far less crowded, even on a warm, mellow Memorial Day Monday afternoon.
There were no flags billowing in the wind, not that I saw at any rate, no florid speeches, no patriotic tunes drifting on the breeze.
Just sun, and spring flowers, and people young and old and in-between, celebrating a beautiful day. A number of students, some with parents some without, were taking high school or perhaps middle school graduation portraits, some with caps and gowns, others in billowing white shirts or dresses.
Some young children cavorted in a fountain pool (the fountain itself turned off), despite signs begging them not to do so.
Others played on playground equipment, including slides and merry-go-arounds and other types that here in Portland don’t appear to be governed by legalistic requirements that they be safe at any speed and for any use. Instead, it’s user beware, and the children seemingly took it to heart and played as if there were no dangers or fears to be reckoned with, including two young girls balanced atop a modernistic spinning wheel like mini-Amazons.
Wilfred Owen, one of the best and most blunt of the famed band of English World War I poets — some far too imperialistic for my taste — was famously harsh on war, and the brutal contrasts between soldiers marching off to fight with drums drumming, horns sounding and banners flying and the truths they discover when they find themselves in actual battle.
He ends his most famous poem like this:
“My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.” [Often translated as “it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.”]
Too harsh?
Possibly. Certainly many brave souls have sacrificed themselves for their countries or causes over the centuries, and for that deserve our thoughts, prayers (if we’re the praying type) and commemoration.
But thinking back on this Memorial Day under a beautiful spring sky, surrounded by beautiful roses and children playing, young couples eating picnic lunches, and older folks walking contentedly down grassy paths, of all the wars that our own country has fought in its relatively short history, it’s hard for me to believe that all those deaths and all that destruction were necessary or right or worthy of our endorsement.
Despite the hype, the patriotic imagery, the calls to do your duty, no questions asked.
Just in my lifetime, the toll has been huge, the destruction enormous, the ramifications often horrifying.
There must be a better way.
As for Owen, destiny came for him on 4 November 1918—one week before the Armistice was signed and the First World War ended. He was 25.
