A Poem For The Ages

At the age of 22 a young Ottawa man, Ewart J. Taylor, commanded a tank in Normandy during the Second World War. He survived the D-Day landing, and was one of the fortunate men in arms with the Canadian army, returning to Canada after the war ended, to marry and to raise a family.

He worked at a journalist, but he didn't, in fact, spend too much of his time raising his family. He was severely emotionally wounded by his exposure to the misery and rigours of combat, to the dreaded sight of death in all its horrible forms, to fear and constant exposure to personal annihilation.

Little was understood then about the dreadful emotional toll that war takes on sensitive souls. Because of his unrecognized emotional turmoil, a plight shared by many other returning combat veterans, his interaction at the most intimate of levels was flawed. His family remembers of him "a path of relational destruction".

He suffered a heart attack at age 35 and survived for a few more years, before dying. When he was 27 he wrote a poem, discovered much later by his oldest son. The pain expressed in the poem, the grace of its writing, may have helped his family understand a little more clearly how, why and when he suffered so grievously he was never quite there for them.

"We, his family, would have loved to see more of the sensitive side as opposed to this hurt, bitter, angry side that we were most privy to", his son remarked ruefully, during a newspaper interview.

The Prayer of the Beaches

     On cold, now silent, sacred
beaches
    We rest, while wrinkled
waters cleanse our hands
    For all that death can ever
teach us
    Lies deep within these
burdened sands.

    Oh God -- help those whose
tongue cannot reach us
    To cast the venom from
their speeches.
     Hatred's voice twists man's
sense
    And made our couch these 
blood-wet beaches.

    And -- Lord this lesson of
the sands --
    Herald it into the many
lands,
    Take it to Earth's far-flung
reaches --
    Sift it through world's 
calloused hands.


    Their grains of truth, they
need not reach us
    For we -- the dead -- are the
soil of the beaches.