PEACE PARTNERS
  • Home
  • Who we are
    • Meet our Team >
      • Cedric Fianko Ofosu
    • Volunteer with Us
    • Our Memberships
  • What We Do
    • Pledge to Peace
    • Peace Education >
      • Peace Education Support
      • Peace Education FAQs
    • Humanitarian Aid
    • Food for People
  • News & Stories
    • Latest News
    • Writings for Peace
    • E-bulletin
  • Our Partnerships
    • Partnership Initiatives
    • Become a Partner
  • Events
  • Donate
    • Fundraising
  • Contact Us

Writings for Peace

Bringing you poetry and prose from around the world to reflect the broader humanitarian mission of Peace Partners. It is our hope to provide a safe space for compassion, empathy, and insight into our shared want for a more peaceful society. Here we showcase work from familiar names and those too-long overlooked by history, as well as the new and emerging voices of today.

Aubade: Chant of the Innocents - by Alan Dugan

4/6/2020

0 Comments

 
Contributor: Sean Morrissey
​As we commemorate the 75th anniversary of VE Day on May 8th, a poem from World War II veteran Alan Dugan is appropriate. Dugan served in the U.S. Air Force during the last stages of the war, an experience he described as “crucial” to his own life’s trajectory and development.

Dugan’s “Aubade: Chant of the Innocents” lays out the gentle reflection of its speaker, a serviceman long-home and looking back on those crucial years when tomorrow’s fate remained an open question. It reads as if from the other side and yet, at the time of writing and the poem’s first publication in January 1945, the world and this soldier-poet were both still very much at war. 

I shall arise in the morning and make my bed. 
I shall walk to the door and admire things. 
 
I shall remember neither the sick mornings
When eyeballs grated on the lid,
And the mind clenched, refused to breathe,
Or mumble and cough over small indigestible portions of dreams,
Nor your frayed voice, speaking also in the morning
To the mirror of its self, saying,
What terrible days we must expect to endure
As a price for this decay around us;
For these contortions we have,
 
Until the time that I can say; 
All in all I remember it (and you)
With a good deal of nostalgia,
I shall mop the floor and stand reveille,
And when the hangar doors open in a huge yawn
I shall enter its noisy intestines 
To perform the function for which I am best fitted. 
I shall stand with mechanics, grouped like surgeons
Over the engine. (whose black blood 
Will camouflage fumbles, delicacy, 
Waving of words and change all hands
Into ratchets, wrenches and soft, ineffectual mallets.)
I shall work with pleasure in great intensity.
I shall say,  Good morning.   Good morning.   What a fine morning.

​
Note the even keeled tone of the poem and its focus on those mundane domesticities of life; the simple joy of labour and one’s being part of the big picture (standing “with mechanics, grouped like surgeons / over the engine). Above all, though, Dugan’s poem speaks to the innate resilience of humanity, that even during periods of great fear and uncertainty we hold out hope toward the light.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    April 2021
    March 2021
    January 2021
    September 2020
    August 2020
    June 2020
    April 2020

    Categories

    All
    Poetry For Peace

    RSS Feed

DONATE
​​​©Peace Partners. All Rights Reserved.
Peace Partners is a UK Registered Charity No. 1166456
Institute of Fundraising Organisational Membership No: Z1038713
Website last updated - 21st April 2021
Contact Us
Join our Mailing List
​Privacy Policy
​Annual Reports
  • Home
  • Who we are
    • Meet our Team >
      • Cedric Fianko Ofosu
    • Volunteer with Us
    • Our Memberships
  • What We Do
    • Pledge to Peace
    • Peace Education >
      • Peace Education Support
      • Peace Education FAQs
    • Humanitarian Aid
    • Food for People
  • News & Stories
    • Latest News
    • Writings for Peace
    • E-bulletin
  • Our Partnerships
    • Partnership Initiatives
    • Become a Partner
  • Events
  • Donate
    • Fundraising
  • Contact Us