Poetry dishonors our fallen servicemen

So, it’s Memorial Day next Monday, May 31, and in my quest to find the poetry in everything, I started thinking about the relation between poetic dialogue and remembering the American war dead.
Yeah, I know, too much time on my hands.
Anyway, since it’s pretty much a truism that everything has had poetry written about it, it seemed at first blush like a simple task: find good poetry dedicated to Memorial Day. As it turns out, “good” is the key word in that sentence.
Because while there are reams of poems about dead soldiers – no I mean thousands, hundreds of thousands, likely more poems about fallen soldiers than actual fallen soldiers – it turns out that painfully few are actually worthy of the sacrifice those soldiers made.
Before we get into the pitiful details, a history lesson. Memorial Day is really a holiday custom made for poetry. Early incarnations of Memorial Day centered around post-civil war Decoration Day, honoring Union dead. The name was changed in the 1880s to Memorial Day to make it more palatable to the South, but it didn’t become common until after World War II. In fact, despite that fact that it seems like Memorial Day has been around forever, it was only in 1967 that it became official.
I put the call out to two friends steeped in poetic language and university and asked them if they could unearth some Memorial Day poetry worthy of mention. From one, I got a simple message, nothing that wasn’t over-the-top or depressing. The other, a professor in Michigan, reminded me of a whole host of early American memorial poetry. Whitman in particular wrote eloquently about the Civil War, most famously in “O Captain! My Captain.” Melville wrote some decent lines and Robert Lowell.
But the vast majority of Memorial Day poetry sounds like this, from William Henry Clay Dodson:
“And in this sunny land of ours, / Now sleeping side by side, / The Union Blue and Southern Gray / Lie buried side by side.”
Here’s another verse from “Freedom Is Not Free” by Kelly Strong:
“I heard the sound of taps one night, / When everything was still / I listened to the bugler play / And felt a sudden chill.”
It’s as we need simplistic patriotism to lessen the terrible cost of celebrating such terrible things: not the sacrifice of soldiers but the fact that they had to be sacrificed at all. Those early poets came straight at the cost of war, the honor of the dead and gallantry of the sacrifice. Now, it’s just crass platitudes and blind flag waving.
Evoking 911 is a cheap substitute for actual dedication.
But maybe that’s just the nature of poetry in relation to our modern Memorial Day – you know the weekend that starts summer, which the Indy 500 is run over, that used cars and mattresses are sold. Ugh. Maybe we deserve the poetry we get. The soldiers who died so that we could celebrate this day, however, certainly deserve better.