A Promise Handed Forward

Just over a decade ago,  daughter Lydia and I made the solemn journey to Gallipoli - not on ANZAC Day itself, but a day of no particular significance. That day is forever etched in our minds, as our eyes closed in a futile attempt to imagine our young Kiwis and Australians landing in that far land ... this year as we remember, it's only words we can offer, but every one so very sincerely and respectfully expressed … it’s a personal attempt to express the emotions of that day as we all reflect …

A PROMISE HANDED FORWARD

We stood where they came ashore,
where boys became history in the space of a morning.
The sea was impossibly blue, almost gentle,
as if it could not remember what it had once carried in the dark before dawn.
Below us the cliffs rose sheer and merciless, and looking down, 
we could only wonder? how courage climbed where reason could not.

At the cove the silence felt older than grief.
There was no birdsong. 
Only an eerie peace, haunting in its stillness.
As my daughter and I walked among row after row of names in stone,
so many impossibly young,
I felt the weight of lives interrupted:
letters never finished, futures never lived,
mothers who waited for footsteps that would not return.

The wind moved softly through the trees
as though it had learned to speak in whispers there.
Each headstone seemed less a marker of death
than a promise handed forward -
that these names would not disappear, that sacrifice would not fade into ceremony,
that remembrance is its own form of keeping faith.

They asked so much of the young.
Too much.
And yet they climbed.
Into fire, into fear, into legend.
Not knowing they would become the story a nation would forever carry in its heart.

And so each Anzac Day we join together -
with dawn, with silence, with gratitude, with tears.
To salute the boys on the beach,
the men on the ridge lines, the nurses, the stretcher-bearers, the horses -
those who sailed away and those who waited at home? beneath Southern skies, 
for sons who would never return.

Not as fading memories of the past,
but as names and stories we carry still, with reverence, with sorrow, with pride -
and with a promise handed forward
that sacrifice will not fade,
that memory will endure, and they will never be forgotten.

- Karyn

Photo - Cecil and Sidney Jenkins of Winton - aged just 22 and 23 - Cecil, a cheesemaker, and Sidney, a bricklayer, answered the call to serve King and country but whose lives, like so many others in this bitter and bloody series of battles, were tragically cut short half a world away. Both brothers served with the Otago Battalion and were killed within hours of each other during a charge from Pope's Hill. Today, their names are commemorated on the Lone Pine Memorial to the Missing, which honours those who died in the area and have no known resting place - NZ Defence Force