It is Day 776 of the Daily Poems. Regrets and Uncertainties is our theme. Our poet today, Alwyn Marriage. disparages the old hymn ‘Onward Christian soldiers’. When she visited a college in Northern Uganda, years ago, she was appalled to see the utter devastation caused by an attack by the Lord’s Resistance Army. It made the militaristic words of the hymn seem even more unsavoury.
The Lord’s Army
Uganda
An army, obviously,
but impossible to say
what the Lord
had to do with it.
Library and lecture rooms
burned-out and black,
patches of blood still
staining the floor.
An uneasy quiet masks
the trauma of students trying
to recover a vestige of life
in their ruined college.
I stand there, appalled,
recall that even as a child,
I disliked the old hymn
Onward Christian soldiers.
Alwyn Marriage
from Alwyn’s forthcoming prize-winning collection, ‘Travelling Light’, Hedgehog Press 2025.