On Sunday 9th November The Royal British Legion remembered The Fallen at Hawkenbury Cemetery in Tunbridge Wells :
The last post was sounded by the Bugler followed by a minute's silence and a poetry reading by David Wakefield. Then was then repeated at the upper cenotaph.
It was a beautiful clear day, the light brilliant, the air crisp and the atmosphere reverential.
The poetry selected for the readings were appropriate and worth recording. So here they are to read, contemplate and reflect upon.
High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a thousand things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence
Hovering there
I've chased the shouting wind along. And flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor even eagle flew
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high un-trespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God
John Gillespie Magee
Royal Canadian Air Force
Died Aged 19.
A Soldier’s Cemetery
Behind that long and lonely trenched line
To which men come and go, where brave men die,
There is a yet unmarked an unknown shrine,
A broken plot, a soldiers cemetery.
There lies the flower of youth, the men who scorn’d
To live, so died when languished
liberty:
Across their graves flowerless and unadorned
Still scream the shells of artillery.
When war shall cease, this lonely and unknown spot
Of many a pilgrimage will be the end,
And flowers will shine in this now barren plot
And fame upon it through the years descend:
But many a heart--- upon each simple cross---
Will hang the grief, ---- the memory of its loss.
Sergeant John William Streets of the York and Lancaster regiment, written in 1915.
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