Lessons Unlearned (Culloden’s Lament)
~This is a lament in the classic sense, best sung slowly and a cappella. I’m still tweaking the words to this song, begun in my damp notebook on the Jacobite battle line at Culloden. I find the melody properly haunting and while it’s kind of overly-sentimental and cliche, I think that’s OK for a lament.
The battlefield memorial at Culloden is a very different place than, say, Gettsyburg. While there are plenty of tourists, Culloden is not a small town unto itself: no bustling commercial enterprise. There are no t-shirt and knife shops or “Rebel Annie’s House of Pancakes”.
It is not littered with a hundred statues and monuments to fallen heros. Just a few flags, one large stone cairn and the small rock marking “The well of the dead”… and the bracken they had to fight their way through, and the sky and the chilly moors of Scotland. But if you close your eyes and let yourself grow still… the wind in both places sounds just the same.
The title refers to a stanza from a verse I ended up taking out, but really for me is the essence of what the song is about:
We go to famous battle fields, and the questions we ask, and the things we study and the lessons we learn are not the ones we should be learning.
We get the T-shirt, but miss the message to humanity.
beneath the soil so poor
among the bones and cannon balls
there lies the truth of war.
and hear the song I sing,
For there never was a shepherd boy
Who won this game of kings.
From Balaclava to Gallipoli,
and from Acre to Flanders field,
‘Neath the rolling green of Gettysburg
lie wounds that won’t be healed.
For in every war that has ever been,
Fools send the brave to die
And we carve their stones and bow our heads,
But too rarely ask them why.
Why generals send our boys to charge
into the mouths of guns,
To be mowed down like summer grass
For a fight that can’t be won.
Oh they sing of glory and honor-
Vow you’ll wear a hero’s name
But for hero, or for cowardly man
The widows weep the same.
For a thousand and a thousand years
it has ever been the same
The poor man fights the rich man’s war,
all for the rich man’s gain.
Yet however proud and pure their hearts
And whatever cause so brave,
In the end, the king is on his throne
And the soldier, in his grave.
The thistles are in bloom.
The skylark sings so boldly
From the heather and the broom.
And then the rain comes sweeping down,
Like tears wept from the sky.
Does it lament so for the dead,
Or for fools like you and I?
Tracy Meisky is a poet, writer, singer, songwriter and all-around boat rocker from way back. Feel free to look around, but if you break it, you bought it.