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4 Memorial day poems
About poems of remembrance
Poems written to be read at a ceremony have a specific difficulty: they must console a crowd, and consolation offered to a crowd is exactly the register that the twentieth century taught poets to distrust.
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McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" is the most-recited war poem in English and repays a careful reading — it is spoken by the dead, and its final stanza does not ask for peace but for the quarrel to be taken up. Owen wrote directly against that instinct. Both are here; read them together.
Start here
- John McCrae — Spoken by the dead — and asks for the fight to continue.
- Wilfred Owen — Written directly against that instinct.
- Walt Whitman — Nursed the wounded, and wrote the American version.
- Randall Jarrell — Five lines, and nothing ceremonial in them.
04/28/2026 14:58h
Historians will tell you my uncle
wouldn't have called it World War II
or the Great War plus One or Tombstone
over My Head.
04/28/2026 14:58h
You take the cats out with you, shut
the door: I have the whole wide bed, all
the covers to fall back asleep in, while you
cut up and sugar the strawberries, grind
the coffee, leave the radio off
so I won't be disturbed. The room is still
dark, rain forecast for the entire day,
other people's family picnics cancelled,
barbecues moved into basements, parades
rerouted to avoid flooded viaducts, the iris
losing petals beside newly cleaned graves,
their mason jars spilt into the saturated ground.
But here is my holiday, this drift back beneath thought
while I lie in the warm impression of your body.
01/17/2025 00:00h
Remember them
not the way the politicians do
with speeches and ceremony
remember them the way
the people who knew them do
by missing them specifically
by name
05/27/2024 00:00h
Every memorial day i go to the cemetery
i don't bring flowers
i bring silence
the men i'm visiting
are past the need for flowers