We deck with
fragrant flowers
Yours has
the suffering been,
The memory
shall be ours.”
The Civil
War triggered the observance of Decoration Day, in the North and the South, and
World War II helped turn it into Memorial Day, though the names were always interchangeable.
For my father, born in 1921 and a veteran of World War II, it was always Decoration
Day. When I was a boy it meant a day off from school, of course, but it also
meant a parade that ended in the cemetery not far from our house, where my
mother is now buried. Prayers, speeches, wreathes, the firing of a three-gun
salute. One year it was Marines firing bolt-action rifles. When they ejected
the spent cartridges, a kid grabbed one from the grass and screamed when it
burned his hand. My patriotism was a matter of unreflective habit. Everyone was
patriotic, or so it seemed. We had internalized Longfellow’s sentiment as
expressed above in the final stanza of his “Decoration Day” (1882). That’s a
long time ago, and written in a vastly alien context from Daniel Mark Epstein’s
“Memorial Day” (Dawn to Twilight: New and
Selected Poems, Louisiana State University Press, 2015):
“The library
is closed – Memorial Day –
We honor men
who died for our freedom
In wars that
most of us cannot recall.
On the
corner, men who should be schoolboys
Flag passing
cars to deal cocaine.
The steel
doors of the library are fit
For a vault.
No windows figure in the wall
To let light
shine on the books,
Just glass
brick pocked by bullets
From
drive-by shootings, thick glass
Cracked in
spidery traceries
Like
promises shattered. Light
From a
million books burned in Berlin
Casts no
shadow on the grey fortress
That is all
this neighborhood will ever know
Of a
library. Here the books are safe
But the
readers are burning.”
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