Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today's Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021.

Today's poem is by a Canadian poet and doctor named John McCrae, who lived from November of 1872 until January of 1918.

He was a World War I poet, and he was a surgeon during the war, and is best known for writing

a famous war poem called In Flanders Fields. He ended up dying of pneumonia somewhere around the

end of World War I in January of 1918. And so, with Monday having been Memorial Day, I wanted to read one of the World War I poets.

And in Flanders Fields is certainly a very popular poem.

But he also wrote another one called The Unconquered Dead.

And that's the one that I want to share with you today.

It goes like this.

It begins with an epigraph that says, quote,

it's a quotation that says, defeated with great loss. As if, you know, you might hear that

line in a newspaper article about a battle or something like that, defeated with great loss. So that's

the epigraph. And the poem goes like this, the unconquered dead.

Not we the conquered, not to us the blame of them that flee, of them that basely yield, not

out, nor ours the shout of victory, the fame of them that vanquish in a stricken field.

That day of battle in the dusty heat we lay, and heard the bullets swish and sing like

scyths amid the over-ripened wheat, and we the harvest of their garnering.

Some yielded, No, not we.

Not we.

We swear by these are wounds.

This trench upon the hill where all the shell-strewn earth is seamed and bare was ours to keep.

And lo, we have it still.

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