Back on the blog for the first time in over a year. I guess that other social media got he better of me.

Anyway, first post are a couple I wrote a few years back about the First World War. First poem is called FLAT FIELD. Happy reading.

FLAT FIELD

Speed through the flat fields
Run as the young blood
Pierce as a bullet, through November mist.
Iron-on-iron cross smooth
Past canal flood and farm
Through the flat fields in half dreamy bliss.

Stand on the deck
In an uneasy stupour,
Last look at home lights shine on the small sea,
Crossing the void,
Returning to arms
That thrill and excite wrapping around me
The darkness envelops,
Night falls again,
A victim to sweet seduction, and then,
Those who have loved
Too hard, too quick;
Cry in their holes, in death heaped thick,
One slow-rotting
Rat bitten corpse on another.
« Your son was a hero. He really did love her. »

Speed through the flat fields,
Run as the young blood
November night rolls away into dawn.
On through the grey light
Drunk with fatigue
Iron-on-iron cross makes my heart bleed.

Next poem is called IN THE SILO SHADOW

IN THE SILO SHADOW

On the road to Suippes, May 2018

The day draws down
And the mid-May sun
Sets lost horizons
As I drive roads 
Running endless fields
Where the green wheat grows, 
Like the dead,
Industrial yields.

No hedge,
Lone tree
Dead turbine line,
No birdsong lament
No monument,
No dwelling
No spire
No human claim,
Just the silo beyond
By  the railway track
Comes the clanking train
Lumbering in,
Fills with grain,
And the dead sleep on
As the train scrapes off
And the dead sleep on
In their lonely plots,
Where they fell when they fell
When this place was hell
And now this is nowhere
But it’s somehwere to be,
This cemetrey
Frontline to turbine
Out of life
Out of time


Like the last man alive
On the dead I look.
On a plinth,
By the gate,
A weathered book,
Of rememberance times,
A few fading lines,
Scrawled by the dead
To the dead of so long ago,
So far gone
When the war was the Great war
And the dead were still young
Unborn in their youth
Still warm in the earth
Still born in their death.

At the going down of this sun
I wander the crosses
One by one
By brother
By father
By each setting son
By name
By age
By country
By faith
By no cause of death,
Shot
Gassed
Blown to pieces
Rest in peace,
In the silo shadow
Down by the tracks.
On the rolling road
To nowhere and back

The day draws down