Veterans Day week's celebrations

                Only poetry sufficed for me as we celebrated Veteran’s Day again. I pulled down an anthology of poems for men, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, that my son had given me for Christmas sixteen years ago. Section three was titled “War.”

                I read through all those poems and decided on “Naming of Parts” from LESSONS OF THE WAR by Henry Reed. The poem seems to be saying, “Look, fellows, even though it’s spring and we’d rather be anyplace else but here, we have our instructions. We have our duties. We are preparing for war.”

NAMING OF PARTS – Henry Reed             

“Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday, / We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning, / We shall have what to do after firing. But today, / Today we have naming of parts. Japonica/ Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens, / And today we have naming of parts. //

                “This is the lower sling swivel. And this/ Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see, / When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel, / Which in your case you have not got. The branches/ Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures, / Which in our case we have not got. //

                “This is the safety-catch, which is always released/ With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me/ See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy/ If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms/ Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see/ Any of them using their finger. //

                “And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this/ Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it/ Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this/ Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards/ The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers: They call it easing the Spring. //

                “They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly Way/ If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt, / And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of/ balance. / Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom/ Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and/ forwards/ For today we have naming of parts. ///

                Henry Reed was born in February 1914 and died December 1986. He was a British poet, translator, radio dramatist and journalist. He was called up to the Army in 1941, spending most of the war as a Japanese translator. Although he had studied French and Italian at university and taught himself Greek at school, Reed did not take to Japanese, perhaps because he had learned an almost entirely military vocabulary.            

Reed's most famous poetry is Lessons of the War, a collection of poems that are witty parodies of British army basic training during World War II, which suffered from a lack of equipment at that time.