W
e would have a very different experience on Skyros.
There we would encounter a poet soldier, a fitting representative of all the men and women of all nations who passed
through these most fought-over waters, from Alexander the
Great to Helen of Troy. They were often surrogates for the
battle of civilizations. Having toured Iran and Turkey I came
to understand these fault lines. It is a tribute to the memory
of so many people that today Greece and Turkey are allied
secular democracies.
My grand-uncle, Henry Kirk, fought in the First World War.
He worked at the Lynn Item newspaper. We would visit him
there as Boy Scouts. Each year in the 1950s when I marched
or rode on floats in the Memorial Day Parade, I met veterans
of the Spanish-American War and both World and Korean
Wars. These encounters among others helped me form an
early perspective on time, on soldiering, on war. I still have
a picture of myself at one or two years of age on a reviewing
stand in my father���s arms on Memorial Day.
In high school I came to know the war poems of Siegfried
Sassoon and Rupert Brooke. I occasionally walk one block to
the church on West 23rd street to visit a memorial where the
name of our Hamilton neighbor, Mr. Norman Prince, is enshrined, commemorating his participation in Lafayette���s Escadrille, a group of Americans who fought for France before
we entered the First World War. Another Hamilton neighbor,
HYLAND
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