Remembrance Sunday

Remembrance Sunday

You’re reading my mail my love,

steaming open my letters over febrile vapours

which frost onto this old sailor’s lens

the shipyard scum

of our shared forefathers.

You’re reading my mail my love,

whetting your paperknife on untempered foreign steel

to poke and shear away

my fragile crust

of secret grief and hard wrought self-determination.

You’re reading my mail my love,

sifting through unuttered words

to keep me safe

from thoughts ripped lose in Saharan haboob,

forgetting that which you taught me,

Lest I Forget:

I wear this bloody flower for you and you alone

A few years ago, reflecting on how much surveillance there was of my every move, and contrasting this 'fact' with my genuine love for my country, I wrote this poem. In the UK 'Veteran's Day' is celebrated on 'Remembrance Sunday': the Sunday after November 11th each year. November 11th was, of course, the day the armistice was signed in 1918, at the end of the Great War (poetically, at the 11th hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month), and we remember the fallen by wearing a poppy, the summer flower that soldiers remembered from Flanders during the First World War, and symbolises the blood that was spilt during that horrendous war.

As a boy and young man I was omnipresent at Remembrance day parades and Church services. As a child soldier in which World War Two was an ever present reality, my father's elder brother a dead hero, these were elmental truths. We sat in cold pews,. awestruck to hear the poetry of Empire and find our truthiness. Once I declaimed it myself, my first public speaking engagement. Carefully enunciating the gravity of Laurence Binyon's poem, that in some viceral way, I thought was the word of God:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.

Before this came Kipling. The enunciation of Empire. How do we discharge the white man's burden and keep our moral principles, he asked?. Kipling's poems often tussled with this moral dilemma (one of which oddly also became a hymn, a religious text), which begins with an appeal for God to look kindly on the Imperial British;

"God of our fathers, known of old,

Lord of our far-flung battle line,

Beneath whose awful hand we hold

Dominion over palm and pine—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!:

My poem is asking the same question of my country. Whether we have forgotten that we have a moral duty to respect the freedoms that we fought for? In the days of snail mail, the opening of other peoples letters was considered immoral. At best a breach of bad manners, at worse a criminal act. Through the command of technology by state security services, the moral ambiguity of poking noses into other peoples personal affairs has been quietly swept aside. I am not a natural crypto-anarchist, and I am a patriot, but to find out that the governance system that I sought to uphold, who's history I held in awe, is also grubbing around in my personal affairs came as a profound shock.

James Fennell MBE has worked in warzones for 37 years across Africa, the Middle East, Central America, the Balkans and Asia. He has a weird interest in string theory and a less weird interest in making really, really good bloody marys. James has worked on using drones for humanitarian assistance and is an active supporter of BITNATION. He is currently working on BITNATION's security and refugee services. His wife, Susanne,is the founder of BITNATION. He was born in the UK and lives in Amsterdam.