(The younger generation’s studies have produced some amazing perspectives on the war and Remembrance Day. Here’s a poem by Chemainus Secondary School Grade 12 student Victoria McCauley that not only captures some compelling images, but maintains a rhyming scheme through 24 lines - no small feat in itself).
A WAR-TORN NIGHT
By Victoria McCauley
On this dark and dreary night
Fog blocks all in sight,
Creating a wall of endless white.
We wait drenched in fright.
I, holding my pack and rifle tight,
Struggling to keep them upright.
Fear clear in my sites
As we sit in the mud’s deep height.
Many friends gone like a losing kite
Lost to someone else’s victory, lost into the night.
Falling in spells from such high heights,
Foreign bombs burst into distant light.
Landing far from this disputed plight,
Yet it quakes the ground with a powerful might.
Houses fall, no longer upright.
In the distance women and children scream in fright,
As the men who fly at such high heights.
Let another bomb go and come into sight;
It bursts like a thousand gunfights.
I wonder what awaits us come morning light?
Perhaps this chaos will invite
The madness I try to fight
Every day and every night.
I was conscripted into this cynical man’s plight.