Remember Remember, 15th September
Gents,I make no apologies for bringing this to your notice,you the community of pilots,in a gratitude befitting this singularly momentous event fought by ordinary young men whom fate chose to make extraordinary,please pause for thought tomorrow.
What did we earth-bound make of it?
Of vapour trails, a vertiginously high
Swarming of midges, at most a fiery angel
Hurled out of heaven,was all we could descry.
How could we know the agony and the pride
That scrawled those fading signatures up there,
And the cool expertise of them who died
Or lived through the delirium of the air?
Grounded on history now, we re-enact
Such lives, such deaths.Time,laughing out of court
The newspaper statistics and the faked
Statistics, leaves us only to record
What was, what might have been:fighter and bomber,
The tilting sky, tense moves and counterings;
Those who outlived that legendary summer;
Those who went down, its sunlight on their wings.
And you, unborn then, what will you make of it-
This shadow-play of battles long ago?
Be sure of this:they pushed to the uttermost limit
Their luck, skill, nerve.And they were young like you.
Cecil Day Lewis
[This message has been edited by mach78 (edited 14 September 2000).]