ANZAC Day is an idea,
one so powerful
that we are all sold to it;
and it is a national idea
transcending death and time,
and even war and the human losses that
are now only caught momentarily
in fleeting images on screens
and in statistics in dusty history books.
This idea has grown through wars
and peace and protests that marked
the years of change for women, culture and race;
and since it first found fertile soil in the
war to end all wars, it has formed into a tree
seeded from the ragged foreign sacred Cove,
a tree that grows now in our southern soil,
a tree still youthful and seeking light,
a tree pruned and nurtured strong
by those too young to remember
those awful bloody and innocent days.
And it has only risen stronger and more
insistent in our national soul,
in that collective psyche that forms across the land
on this most solemn and reverential day,
though you cannot call it religion,
for it is not about God,
but about what brings us
together, not in heaven
but in death.
We stand and wait as collective and
hear the haunted sounds of
silence and the trumpet’s call,
all of us as strangers and companions
around this shine formed in memory and respect,
formed through this national myth;
and we think about the ashes
and the graves and the cost,
though we probably know no more
than this, just the idea,
the powerful idea,
that we should always remember them,
for they were us,
and in sharing that idea there is no creed,
nor race, nor class, nor gender, or any other
separation, for we are but one indeed.
19/4/2017