Your Humble Blogger usually observes Armistice Day with a certain mournful bitterness I think appropriate to the occasion. Today, for some reason, I’m reaching toward a more wistful emotion, and as such, present this, from the handsomest man in England, now richer dust in some corner of a foreign field. The bitterness is daily, now, the nightmare news, but perhaps today I’ll try to think of the lives that could have been.
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
-Rupert Brooke
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.