remembrance day.

IMG_7310, originally uploaded by pirateygoodness.

You know. I never realized that Remembrance Day actually meant a lot to me, until I went to Korea for a year, and had to celebrate Pepero Day. (Pepero Day is quite possibly the most commercialized iteration of Valentine’s Day ever, and unashamedly a marketing holiday – you buy Pepero cookies for your friends and family and teachers to show them that you care, and because the cookies look like the number 1, it happens on 11/11.) But it turns out, it really is important to me to take a minute and remember. Which is why I really do love the Royal Canadian Legion Poppy Campaign, because it’s a nice, visible reminder that we should all take a moment today, at 11:11, to remember what actually happens after war, on a human level.

I could leave you guys with the obligatory John McCrae poem, but instead I’ll leave you with this one, written by Wilfred Owen after he saw action in the First World War.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest13
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

- Wilfred Owen, 1918 (Source)

(”Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” is latin for “it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”)