Remembrance Day Poems, by Kendall Johnson

Avatar, by Henry Lintott (Scotland) 1916

Avatar  

I can’t believe my eyes. On my computer screen is a well 
appointed virtual sales room with stylish furniture highlighting a 
painting, designed to show me how well it would underscore the 
elegance of my home. The painting is Avatar, by Henry Lintott, 
painted in 1916. Four angelic figures bear upward the body of a 
soldier struck down in the Great War. It is said that the painting 
brought great peace to British poet and infantryman Wilfred 
Owens who came to visit it often in 1918 during his recuperation 
from battle shock in Craiglockhart hospital nearby. This was just 
before he was declared healed, and sent back to the front. Owen 
was killed in the trenches, one week before Armistice was 
declared. I think of Marines, dying in the Vietnamese mud, dying 
before me on my own evacuation flight, dying later in the VA 
hospitals, and sometimes later still, dying at home by their own 
​hand.

Kendall Johnson

Gassed, by John Singer Sargent (USA) 1919

Armistice Day  
​
“Do you believe in ghosts?” The child looks at me for truth. I 
can speak to the fears, but not to the question, for I know some 
ghosts too well. I see them emerge from behind parked cars. 
Whole families follow me from tunnels of Vinh Moc. They call 
to me at night from free-fire zones, stranded on jungled 
beaches, from faces I never saw. Their shadows reach for me 
from stretchers and drip bags, and piles of too-late bandages. 
Prescribed rituals and beliefs, incense burnings and magic 
spells: all hollow songs against darkness

Kendall Johnson

These poems first appeared in Wordpeace.

Kendall Johnson served with the US Navy in Vietnam. He is a painter, and author of Fireflies Against Darkness (Arroyo Seco Press, 2021), Black Box Poetics (Bamboo Dart Press, 2020), and Chaos & Ash (Pelekinesis, 2019). His catalogued collection of desert paintings and cherita poems Melting Into Air (Sasse Museum of Art) is forthcoming.