At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border
This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.
Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed—or were killed—on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.
Notes
Where Wilfred Owen exposed the mechanized clamor of the battlefield, William Stafford turns his gaze to an unmarked tract of borderland, honoring the radical sanctity of an ordinary field where no battle was ever fought, no blood spilled, and no triumphal stone erected. The speaking subject marks a quiet reverence for absence—celebrating air that remains clean of cannon smoke, grass that never hid an ambush, and soil where earthworms and wild clover simply go about their unheroic lives across an invisible line. It anchors September’s theme of Echo on International Peace Day in the sacred quietude of restraint, reminding us that true peace is not a monument forged from historical carnage, but the silence of weapons never raised and an earth left to echo only the wind. #September #WilliamStafford #Peace #War #Poetry
William Stafford, “At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border” from The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems. Copyright © 1998 by the Estate of William Stafford.