ANZAC Poem

Monday, 20 April 2026, 1:11 pm
Opinion: Frances Palmer

LEST WE FORGET

Remembrance must be careful what it erases,
lest we forget, and fail to learn from experience.

My remembrance of Vietnam as a young nurse,
begins in a helicopter flying over bomb-pocked terrain,
enroute to an unknown, unsafe place.

Remembrance of war for nurses needs no medals or paper poppy reminders;
it recalls the syncopated pop and crackle rhythms of shelling, day and night.

The memory of a platoon of silent soldiers sheltering in a makeshift medical clinic,
merges with that of frantic mothers forging forward with fragile children,
displaced from Quang Tri’s destroyed homes, villages and razed cities;
faces of trauma, stress, and heroic attempts to raise families,
amidst brutal conflict, loss, and scarcity.

Remembrance cannot blot out columns of cots containing crying babies
and sad children in Hue’s crowded, barren orphanages,
nor Da Nang’s amputees of all ages begging on the street;
it embraces distraught doctors and parents,
losing fatally injured children due to a lack of medical equipment,
in contrast to limitless lethal hardware from death industries decimating them.

Remembrance can invoke sadness and anger at the cruelty and needlessness of war;
remembrance to inspire hope moves beyond displays of weaponry, combat uniforms,
and names of our dead soldier relatives carved into cold marble walls.

It will portray regret for all sacrificed on the altar of war,
from soldiers who believed this was the only way forward,
to mothers and children whose homes were made war zones.

Remembrance that inspires hope will also show those who resisted war,
not as ‘Outsiders’ grouped in a glass box with enemy prisoners of war,
but in vibrant peace galleries of work for peace and justice from time immemorial,
before and after the UN Charter enshrined humanity’s highest principles
to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.’

Remembrance which presents positive pathways forward,
lighting candles rather than fuses,
while the Middle East descends into darkness,
will proudly portray the perseverance and power of our nuclear-free movement,
and our government’s courageous NZ Nuclear-Free Zone legislation,
before the fall of the wall,
when international mistrust and militarism surged
to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Authentic remembrance will not sentimentalise sacrifice,
nor hide evidence of civilian trauma in a back room,
or deny sordid realities that seem ‘too confronting.’
Remembrance must be careful what it erases,
lest in forgetting,
we help create new catastrophes to commemorate.

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