Menin Gate Commemoration 28 December 2011 Poem by Danny Draper

8: 00 pm:
The gate closed to mundane daily comings and goings,
Those gathered fidgeted with small talk in anticipation
Names in precisely incised rolls clothed cavernous walls for
Those extinguished, expunged from the ordinary, their
Wasted blood in nearby fields long since leached away
And the vintage war with horses and wagons
Gas and brittle and unreliable machines
as good as ancient history from a distant millennia.

A mixed crowd fell silent beneath Menin Gate,
the Last Post reverberated in crisp night air
Solemn peace connected cultures
A new paradigm away from religion and ideology,
Secular with smudged borders where
Nationalism and expansionism have no currency
Where those once connected only in death
Are interconnected globally by trade and friendship,
While governments guard borders and self-interest
Driven by the old entrenched paradigms,
The people build and enmesh humanity
Progress change by the common good
Under global markets where business is online
Freely conducted nowhere but everywhere instantly
And social media builds and webs a global community,
People move around the world by need or choice and
nationality remains as a passé concept or
A nod to roots or origin,
Or consequence of geography, a
perfunctory necessity for planning,
Cultures blend through friendship and knowledge,
Old boundaries and old hatreds,
Old contrivances of whipped up
Xenophobic stereotypes and scape goats
Seem ever more meaningless
and it's seeds increasingly sterile.
Exploitation is now market driven
But will pass by the peoples’ will.

Those that gave and later forgave
were the essence for today’s reality,
Known and unknown in the fertile Earth, they
lay at rest, assured in our memory.