Alice Oswald's poem on battle

 An appropriate read for Memorial Day?

How about Alice Oswald’s long poem Memorial, which recounts how soldiers in the Iliad met their end?

Her poem is Homer’s poem without the plot, without the sense of purpose. The deaths don’t have meaning. They are simply deaths.

She simply recalls — in one case after another — how the soldiers died in battle. In the Trojan War, men were speared, stabbed, struck by arrows and javelins, strangled and trampled.

We’ve come a long way technologically. Now soldiers — men and women — are shot, blown to bits by artillery and mines, and vaporized by bombs, missiles and drones. Sometimes they are shot after surrendering. 

An earlier note suggested that we Americans remember those who died in our many wars in a context that involves a sense of collective good. Without that sense of collective good, there is no dying for a noble cause. There is just dying.

It’s an important point, not much mentioned on Memorial Day. Memorial gets to that point. It’s powerful, intense reading.

• Source: Alice Oswald, Memorial; London: Faber & Faber, 2012.