Poem: Was it for this? by Gillian Clarke

Was it for this?

‘Was it for this the clay grew tall?’ Futility ‘My subject is War and the pity of War – the poetry is in the pity.’ Wilfred Owen

Once war was history, a famous place –Catraeth, Cilmeri, Bosworth, Flodden Field –where men fell nameless, loved or loveless, crying for home, mud-suffocated, hallowed by the last rites of rain, a shroud of snow, graves overgrown by centuries of grass. A hundred years. The war to end all wars: a lamentation of names: Ypres, the Somme, the Sambre-Ouse Canal, the house at Ors where Owen wrote his brave last letter home. His voice still sounds through war’s duplicity, refusing silence: “the poetry is in the pity”. A hundred years. Time to remember them. On village monuments their deaths are stone. They bore our names, or names we know, men born in our towns, a house on the hill, the farm across the valley – they live there still –yet they became the earth of somewhere else. Now war is poisoned air, the screaming sky. No time for glimmering goodbyes. No kiss. The fallen are the old, the weak, the young, the child brought from the sea, a city bombed. Gaza. Helmand. Aleppo. Homs. ‘Was it for this..?’

Gillian Clarke Commissioned by Literature Wales and funded by the Welsh Government for the 2019 Holy Glimmers of Goodbyes event

2015

In 2015, Wales commemorated the Gallipoli Campaign and the terrible losses suffered there, with many of the activities through the year concentrating on the lives of the people involved or affected. Every death or injury, everyone who came home and had to struggle to rebuild their lives, was an individual. The online Faces of the Falleninitiative is a stark reminder of this, while exhibitions such as Belief and Action demonstrated that not everyone agreed with the war and had to find their own ways to respond.

Right: Wounded British soldiers about to embark on a hospital ship at Suvla Bay, Gallipoli, 1915. © IWM (Q13388)