Dulce et decorum est?

Armistice Day. The first time since the great war that we have remembered without the presence of anyone who was there.

Today I am in Coventry, a city still scarred by the last world war. Somehow today renders Armistice Day more poignant. More poignant because of the daily toll of young life in the wastes of Helmand.

Britain now at war. To what end? And when will that end come?

Some of the questions that are bound to arise when we talk with a cross-section of the general public tonight on Channel 4 News.

We shall be in this city addressing the home front on the matter of the war in Afghanistan. In the meantime, and though I shall blog again later after the two-minute silence, I would commend this poem by the poet laureate, whom I had the great honour to meet on Sunday night.

LAST POST
by Carol Ann Duffy
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud…
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home –
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce – No – Decorum – No – Pro patria mori.
You walk away.
You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too –
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert –
and light a cigarette.
There’s coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.
You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.