Richard Thomas White, born 1899, signed up in 1914, aged 14
By Violet White
I will not be remembering you
embedded with panoply, poppies and pomp,
entrenched in all that has never renounced what sent you there;
a masque for your misery,
your sacrifice sanitised by ceremony.
I like to think of you as finally free
from those gamesters who cast you as their die.
Though the world has never unseated them for it,
neither is there any observable repentance in them for it,
and we do not have Peace.
For even where it might be hoped
that the remembrance of you
would yield sense and sobriety,
propriety always prevents.
I will not join the parades
saluting those rapidly returning us
to the poverty they press-ganged you from.
I will not sing their songs,
repeat their mantras of subjugation,
bow before their renewed drive
to plant that same old boot on our necks.
To their reclaimed imperial hubris
I will not agree.
I will not hymn the rogue religion of recrafted Patriotism,
cloaking the same well-heeled oppressor,
covering the same old flesh and bones of Supremacy
in a remastered vision. I will not be fooled
by the parody of our own class-tongue
spoken by paid thugs,
hired by the same charlatans
to confuse again the community of the disenfranchised.
But I will honour you
in the fight for our common humanity;
for the bounty of the Earth
to be returned to the Peoples of the Earth;
I will raise my hands again to the blessed struggle
for Justice, for Truth,
for the Rule of Liberty and Love;
Freedom for the Captives,
Good News for the Poor,
The Lifting-up of the Broken-Hearted.
And Deliverance from all oppression.
Do you hear me, Beloved?
I tell you
I will not dishonour you
with anything less than this.
