Housatonic — This Memorial Day, I offer you a poem by Carl Sandburg, written in 1918.
Grass
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
At cemeteries and battlefields all over the world, nature, specifically grass, smooths out, covers up, the dirty work of war. In a cemetery the flags wave, and, if the day is pleasant, the place is gentle and green. There is no hint of the horrors only the dead under the grass can know.
The trenches, the shell craters, the deep-dug fortifications of battles, perhaps long-forgotten, are softened and gentled by grass. One might try to imagine what happened at these consecrated places by reading the weathered markers and monuments sprung up across a smooth green hillside or arrayed like silent troops across a wide, waving field. But try as he might, he can never know the dying screams of men blown to pieces, all the while tearing at their uniforms to find their wounds, and thus determine whether they will live or die.
As the grass grows and the poppies blossom, the lessons of history go begging as we blithely repeat our deadly mistakes time-after-time all down the days, all down the years.
We, perhaps by blind luck, might eventually heed the lessons our bloody past may teach us about the futility of war. There must always be a Memorial Day. The heroic dead must never be forgotten. But how blessed will be the time when we stop producing veterans, the day we needn’t send the best of our children off to war.
For a schedule of Memorial Day parades and observances in South Berkshire County, click here.
