The old Lie: DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI

“I do like to see the arms and legs fly.”
-- Colonel George S. Patton


Futility

Move him into the sun-
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds-
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
-O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?

-- Wilfred Owen, 1918

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

-- Randall Jarrell, 1945

Collateral

Are those wet
red,
blossoming petals mine?
Am I laid-out,
on this glistening wreath?
The next cortege of cordite, burries
a dirge of unanswered questions:
as I take root.
Yet one more poppy.

-- Eric Morrissey
Iraq, December 2004

Bottom row middle, Oliver L. Tessier, Belly Gunner, B-24
(Age 18, 1943)