No. 73 September 2005 FUTILITY Move him into the sun – Gently its touch awoke him once, At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France, Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds – Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides, Full-nerved – still warm – too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
O what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth’s sleep at all?
In his Liturgy for a Meditation on Force, Richard Holloway included Wilfred Owen’s Futility, one of the great English poems on the wastefulness of the killing that we do. On November 4 1918, just seven days before the Armistice, Wilfred Owen was caught in a machine gun attack and killed. He was twenty-five when he died.
Included in Richard Holloway's Liturgy for a Meditation on Force at the SoF 2005 Conference.