Skip to main content

Letters to Mother



Addressed as “Dearest” except when young,
at five, from Birkenhead, he wrote.
They were making huts,
“I have got a lantern,
and we are lighting them up tonight.
With love from your Wilfred,
I remain your loving son…”

Six years later he writes again.
“We went to lantern service…
I don’t think I told you Mr. Moore’s text…
It was Pilate’s sermon,
as he called it: `Behold the man,’
He told us a lot about Pontius Pilate,
& then about `The Man’.

The last day of nineteen-oh-eight,
“Dorothy Leslie the Cates & I
took the toboggan to
Peppard Common,”
and simply had,
“a splendidrippinggrandmajesticgloriousdelightfulscrumtiousexquiesitelyexcruciating time…”
Tea will be ready soon.
Dearest Mother.

“My dearest Mother,
Many, many thanks for your long letter.
Do please call upon the Canon
and ask about the fees…

…Very disagreeably as experience is forcing upon me the fact
that money must purchase
even such pleasures as good books…
[I] regard the life whose sole aim
is money-making to be the most pitiable.
Perhaps you think me still hopelessly undecided,
but I hope that the Canon’s advice may clear things up a bit.

Teaching in Bordeaux he writes,
“I must talk about myself
or you will not consider this a letter.”
Funny you asked about my hair,
just last week I noticed grey was cropping up again..
“It seems quite a long time
since I last heard from home…”

Too many wounded I have seen.
Early winter nineteen-fourteen.
“Dearest of Mothers,
Your loving letters never end without a prayer…
Indeed, though I look up and down the world,
I see no man whom I could serve
without a suffocated feeling of captivity.
This may turn out fortunate after all…”

At a woodshop,
trying to save the eight pounds it takes to get back home,
making luggage out of lumber
he talks about the war,
“The beginning of the End must be ended,
and the beginning of the middle of the end is now.”

After Typhoid shots,
“In the night the arm got pretty bad.
I still feel as if a horse had got my arm between its teeth.”
If not fit by Monday then light duty I receive,
“which I believe consist of standing still and staring…
Recruits are very numerous now—17 on Monday last.”

“The sun still shines…
large numbers of wounded were being rushed down the road…
I came, also to see the gentleman in charge…
He has just come in-,
an extraordinary hunch-backed Irishman…”
“This afternoon I went forth in search of adventure,
and took a joy ride in a tank…

Do not inform friends & relations that I pass my hours reading,
sleeping, conversing, & gathering roses from bewildered gardens.
But so it is,
and I’m getting fat on it.”

The last letter of his life.
“I will call the place…
`The Smoky Cellar of the Forrester’s House…’
My servant and I
ate the chocolate in the cold middle of last night,
crouched under a draughty Tamboo…
There is no danger down here,
or if any,
it will be well over before you read these lines.”

A week before the Armistice,
Wilfred Owen died,
crossing the Sambre Oise Canal,
shot at twenty-five.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peregrinating the Albuquerque Bosque

  The Map. Overview: Starting in the San Juans in Colorado, the Rio Grande "is the twenty-second longest river in the world and the fourth or fifth longest in North America" ( Texas State Historical Society ).  While the river is characterized by the area it flows through, the river from Elephant Butte Dam to the south to Cochiti Dam in the north is called the Middle Rio Grande.  And in the middle of the middle Rio Grande is the roughly 20 plus miles that flows through Albuquerque.  From an airplane, the Rio Grande is a brown ribbon bordered a green ribbon.  That green ribbon is the Bosque .  I've always been fascinated really exploring an area, getting a sort of overview of an area then drilling down to really get it.  It's led to me hiking the Sandias from end to end and then hiking outlying trails multiple times, biking all the trails in the Cedro Peak area because someone put them on a map, trying different routes to get to ...
3 comments
Read more

Peregrinating the Albuquerque Bosque-the Autumnal Equinox edition

Overview:   In June, around the Summer Solstice, my wife, my dog, and I set out to hike the Albuquerque Bosque from end to end over two days .  It was well over a hundred degrees and after starting later than expected we didn't make it as far the first day as we hoped.  But we did make it. Now, three months later, around the Autumnal Equinox, we set out to do it again.  Our route was slightly different and, with the weather being a lot more pleasant, broke the day into a thirteen mile day and a five mile day:  eighteen total miles from Valle de Oro National Wildlife Refuge to the Alameda Bridge right on the border between Albuquerque and Corrales. The things we wanted to do differently this time were pretty straightforward:  1) don't get lost at the south terminus and get into the bosque sooner, and 2) walk even more on the westside.  So, the route was a follows:  we'd walk on the east side from Valle de Oro to the Rio Bravo Bridge, cro...
3 comments
Read more

"That's Scaughtland for ya!"

The United Kingdom Up at the top of that map, basically the top half, is a tiny nation with a big footprint.  With roughly the same population as Minnesota, Scotland has a land mass the size of South Carolina, yet there are more people in the United States that have Scottish and/or Scotch-Irish ancestry than live in Scotland. My family is one of those. In the course of growing up, I was indoctrinated to celebrate my Scottish ancestry (primarily by my grandmother but we'll talk about that later).      So a year ago, my wife took a trip with her mother to Japan.  I looked at the pictures that she posted, and when I'd talk to her on the phone, I noticed something.  She was happy.  This is not to say she's always unhappy, but this was different.  She was having a good time, engaged in the world, curious, and happy-like no matter what the challenge.  And traveling to Japan with her mother posed some interesting challenge...
Post a Comment
Read more