Renewing the flags for Memorial Day

Sitting here by a bannered grave,

I keep company with a warrior long since dead.

Just marking quieting time in this new spring season …

I see in my mind's eye a procession

The family, friends and faithful of this warrior of memory,

And especially note that it was a child who carried the flag.

This warrior of old fought and died for the flag

That hangs in tatters now over his unkempt grave.

How long shall it be before he is lost to memory?

Souls when not prodded by the living do become as dead.

It is for us, the living, to make matter in our life-procession

That transient and fleeting spark he sacrificed in his ill-fated summer season.

I meditated upon my thoughts and became lost in this, my own autumn season …

But startled as a freshening breeze from the west unfurled that battered flag

And again and again, as if in procession,

Unfurled and made dance the tatters over each so-marked grave,

Bringing to mind the demands of all the warrior-dead

That they too shall not be lost to memory.

A tortured vision of grown children, those wearing blue or butternut, rebounded in my memory

As if carried by the warring winds of a long ago winter season

Which whipped and winnowed even the leaves already dead

And threatened to tear asunder that flag

Which strained at its moorings by the threatening graves

Waiting at the wrong end of that damned and fury-filled procession!

Oh, that poor child who led our solemn and noted procession

Already struggled to see the warrior's face in memory

As he led the parade of mourners to an open grave

In this his own hard and confused season.

For a parting gift, he left the flag …

A salute to the warrior his father who now bivouacs with the dead.

Today, with the threats and blusters of winter now dead,

As I sit here keeping company with my thoughts in procession,

I am enlightened as to why we renew the remnants of yesteryear's flag:

We do so to create in others a memory

That will last throughout their lifetime season

Of the mattered life of the warrior who rests in this grave.

Our honored dead shall live in perpetual memory,

Throughout the procession of every new season,

As we focus upon the fluttering flag that marks the remembered warrior's grave.

Joe Nihen

Lansford