On the occasion of today, here’s a piece from the back catalogues: nineteen years ago today in fact!  I still have vivid recollections of stringing the verses together on foolscap in the breaks between classes and then rushing to the MS-DOS computer lab running Novell Netware to draft a legible copy for after-school submission to the local Royal Canadian Legion Hall – they were running a youth poetry contest for poems about Remembrance Day and I had a fire lit under me to rock the contest adjudicators with my hardline idealistic conscientious objector perspective that war brutalizes all its participants, even uninjured victors.  "How strange,“ I thought, that the contest deadline was at noon, "because all participants in a youth poetry contest will be tied up in school at midday, yet they are the only ones eligible to submit.”

I rushed off to the Legion Hall as soon as the tractor-feed printout finished chugging out and breathlessly handed the printout to the combination doorman/bartender.  Before he had a chance to ask me to remove my headwear (as a gesture of respect toward the portrait of Queen Elizabeth hanging in the room), I asked him if I’d missed the contest deadline.  He had absolutely no idea what the heck I was talking about and I slunk out in defeat, denied an opportunity to break out of the artscene lit ghetto with my rhyming thoughts.  Back to rhyming BBS names!

Just as well, the poem probably would have just upset an old man.  I doubt I knew much about eg. Operation Paperclip in 1995, but I figured my eyes were clear enough to see that something stunk about a country with a single border shared with a friendly nation maintaining a standing military. My countryman John McCrae wrote one of the most canonical poems of the Great War, In Flanders Fields, but my tastes ran more toward the veil-lifting clarity of the stark writings of Wilfred Owen.

Mage kindly illustrated the work: within 13 months of Mist’s first artpack launch, he had graduated from our company to Integrity and from there to ACiD.  Many people took that achievement as a sign to retire at the height of their game, but apparently he felt he still had one or two pictures left in him.  I don’t know if this one was ever even submitted to an ACID pack, but it gave us the distinction of having a work by an ACID artist appear in our humble collection, MIST1196.ZIP.  Thanks again!

(Edited to add: some remarks from the artist!  "I wish I had something, but I don’t. I vaguely remember thinking a minimalist silhouette would be appropriate. I think, too, that my quitting the scene soon afterwards had less to do with being at the top of my game, and more to do with being 17 and having a car and a girlfriend.“)

For the benefit of Google spiders here, now, is the raw text of the lit:

Lest we Remember

A war-hardened soldier, a young farmer lad -
he’s one and the same.
Trying to hide his doubts, silently mad;
he plays no man’s game.

Holding a rifle, he chokes back his bile
and hopes not to use it.
Eat or be eaten, he thinks all the while
and tries not to lose it.

Crouching in ditches, he smells the rank scent
of the battle’s grim toll.
Comrade and brother swears not to relent,
his fond face shows no soul.

A gunshot rings out, ripping through the tense silence;
a man meets the ground.
This crude overture starts the music of violence,
a sickening sound.

He’s been enraptured to make old wrongs right
at no matter the cost.
It doesn’t matter for which side he fights
for he’s already lost.

The poppy of peace flashes bright nowadays;
the "remember-me-not.”
We fought for our truth but we practise their ways;
We forgave and forgot.