Cosmic Prose

Natasha Regehr

Month: July 2024

When in Rome…

July 19, 2024 / / 0 Comments

My first impressions of Rome were not so favourable.  It seemed to be a city made of garbage and graffiti.  I saw it on the bus from the airport to the train station, and then again on the walk from the train station to the apartment.  Garbage and graffiti everywhere.

“You’re going to love Europe,” I told my niece.  “Everything here is so pretty.  The ornate buildings.  The immaculate gardens.  The cobblestone streets.  Everything.

No, not everything.  Definitely not the trajectory from the Termini train station to our humble abode.  Rome, I thought, is a dirty, unpalatable city.  I’m not so sure I like it here.

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Lest We Forget: Pass it On

July 6, 2024 / / 4 Comments

I did not wear a poppy last year on Remembrance Day.  It wasn’t a statement: I simply forgot.

But as I learned today on the shores of Dieppe, forgetting is a statement.

Yesterday I visited the famed Flanders Fields of John McCrae’s poem.  Rows of crosses, row on row.  Thousands and thousands of them.  Each representing a boy-child, son, husband, father, lost on the Ypres Salient in World War I, gaining a mere eight kilometres for the Allies through the many months of brutal attacks.  Stones marked “A soldier of the Great War, known unto God” because their bodies could not be identified in the carnage.  Men lost to the first crippling gas attacks, in the days before gas masks.  Men whose body parts could not be sorted from the others and reassembled for a proper burial.  Men who died, and died, and died again, not knowing the outcome of the war that was supposed to end all wars.

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