In Remembrance: not poppies, but meadow-flowers

I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

--from "I have a rendezvous with Death," by Alan Seeger, 1888-1916

While we appreciate the everlastingly-popular "In Flanders Fields," the Squirrelings are a bit tired of it...so they were interested to read Alan Seeger's poem, which appears just before John McCrae's in our copy of One Hundred and One Famous Poems.

Which is inscribed "To Mother, with love from Jack, Margy and Sally, Mother's Day 1946."

Which, for a mother in 1946, might have been extra meaningful...since many Jacks (and Margys and Sallys) would no longer have been there to write that. I don't know who Jack was, whether he was old enough then to have been in the war or not. I assume he was one of our relatives. Maybe I'll ask Grandpa Squirrel about it.

9 What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.

10 Is there anything of which one can say,
"Look! This is something new"?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.

11 There is no remembrance of men of old,
and even those who are yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow.--Ecclesiastes 1:9-11, NIV


We do remember the Alans who kept the rendezvous, and the Jacks who (perhaps) served and returned home.

We also remember the 133 Canadian soldiers who have died in the past seven years.

And those who have served and returned.