As mentioned before, I've been fairly attuned to the goings-ons in Ukraine, as I have a personal friend trapped there, their uncle trapped now in a captured city controlled by Russians with no water, internet and so forth.

It made me realise that no matter how much media we consume to keep track, we simply can't understand what it's like on the ground - for both Ukrainians and Russians. Many Russians, after all, are conscripts, confused and scared, unaware what to do or how to avoid death.

When you really meditate and try to imagine this scenario that could happen to any of us at any given time, it really kind of hurts the heart.

My friend and colleague told me her mother has started writing Poetry about the situation there. It reminded me of an exceptionally dark poem by British poet, Wilfred Owen, who died in action during WW1 - Exactly one week before Armistice (practically to the hour). The main focus on this blog is not actually this poem but it's worth a brief mention:

Dulce et Decorum

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The poem is of course rather anti-war, and riling against the sentiment of the Latin 'lie' being fed to soldiers, translated as 'It is sweet and fitting to die for the homeland'.

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Today I had my first online class, as Shanghai shuts its schools and offices to keep that zero tolerance Covid policy going.

I decided to set some homework analyzing music set to another poem on the First World War: In Flanders Fields.

Honestly, as I tried to sing it to get a good idea of the range and harmonic positioning of the melody, I found it difficult to get through it without tearing up quite a bit.

There's something to be said about the act of singing having a very deep and direct connection to your emotions, as your body physically feels the words travelling through your system.

But the poem also paints such a sorrowful image, it's hard to avoid feeling something heavily melancholy as you get through it.

In Flanders Fields

This poem was written by John McCrae, a Canadian soldier, fairly early in the war, around 1915, lamenting a certain battle on the borders of Belgium/France, where his friend was lost in action and he himself treated soldier as a medic.

The poem is written from the perspective of many of the deceased and I think it's worth discussing and then listening to.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

Quick analysis

McCrae talks of the beauty of the poppies blooming in the fields of battle where no other flowers would grow, amongst the graves.

He describes the Larks, a bird, singing above, yet cannot be heard on the ground due to all the gunfire.

The dead reveal they are the ones talking, how they were once loved, and now they're dead.

Finally, the dead ask the living to continue their fight (the war very much still raging on), and if they fail to do so, they cannot rest in peace, despite the beauty of the poppies around them.

Music

To me, by far the most beautiful music set to this poem is by John Jacobson and Roger Emerson.

Wrap up

We built a world around the two great wars. Prior to WW1, war was considered glorious, heroic and patriotic. It was the First World War that, through development of technology, made the concept of war so unimaginably horrifying that this image started to change. World War two, a war twice as bad (in terms of death toll, at least), solidified this.

NATO, something consistently demonised as an expansionist, imperialist force of evil, was created to prevent such tragedies of otherworldly scale from happening again. We have continued to develop global systems which prevent this, but as we continue to forget what these horrors were truly like, as those who fought them slowly fade out of existence, we find it surprisingly easy to justify risking returning to such events once more.

Ukraine, Taiwan, these patches of land can easily be a spark that could refresh all our memories once more, only this time there is a possibility that nobody would be left to write poetry about it.

This is why I want to keep track of Ukraine's situation. I want to be informed, but I want Ukraine to know that some of us are trying our best to remember a time when all were subject to such tragic times.

War can never be justified anymore.