Remembrance

An Anzac day song-n-delve, lest we forget

I dragged myself out of bed in the pitch black to go the ANZAC day dawn service. I don’t entirely understand my motivation for going. I won’t subject you to dubious conjecture. I felt moved to go. I wasn’t alone. Couldn’t get a park anywhere near. Made it just in time to get a hilltop possie outside the park. A bloke who’d been attending for sixty years said he’d never seen so many people.

Offering

Today’s video Song-n-delve is an offering to Ares, God of war, who embodies courage to fight for what matters, (along with the slippery slope from courage to bloodlust). I weave together a medley from the Larrikin-esque marching tune, ‘Pack up your troubles’ and the heartbreaking war poem, ‘Dreamers’ from Siegfried Sassoon. I wanted to dance with duality, honouring the human capacity to solider on to fight for what matters, whilst also recognising the vital role that heartbreak plays to keep us human.

Video correction: I name the poet as Frederick Sassoon. It is Siegried Sassoon.

Remembrance

I’m remembering the seaside this morning; the dawn service, pelicans flying overhead, flag lowered to half mast. The bugle. The poem. The choir singing, ‘lest we forget.’ The sharing of one minute silence with strangers. Remembrance.

Back in my university days I was proudly anti-war. Life was simple then (in my mind). Good guys didn’t start or go to wars. Bad guys did. There were heroic peace protesters. There were evil warmongers and the idiots they’d fooled with their propaganda. I rolled my eyes each Anzac day in disapproval at (what I imagined to be) the glorification of war. It’s not so simple to me now. My teenage anti-war stance was almost solely due to watching a student guild screening of the musical, ‘Hair.’ Now I’ve seen other movies; ‘Inglorious Bastards’ and ‘Once upon a time in Hollywood’ (I’ll never look at hippies the same way again.) And then of course, real life. I’ve seen (thankfully at a distance) a few wars come and go. And they’re complicated. Don’t get me started.

Warsplaining

My Song-n-delving aims to look at the world through poetic, personal, psychological and spiritual lenses. It’s not intended to be a political space, though I have spilled into that territory on occasions, for example, trying to get my head around the history of the middle east in general, and the Oct 7th horror specifically.

Today, Anzac day, I’m going to steer clear of geopolitics. It’s not that I don’t have a view. But God knows there’s more than enough warsplaining* at the moment.

*This is one of the most striking articles I’ve read of late. Notably, it doesn’t comment on current conflicts, but rather comments on the commentary itself; a satellite view with accompanying breakdown of the phenomena the author describes as warsplaining.

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