Blàr na Fala

Disturbed ground

The earth in turmoil

And the blood in it

Season after season

Seeps deeper into darkness.

Out of barren fields

The remains of armies

Rise like ghosts or mist,

A fitting shroud for this 

No man’s land.

…abandoned now…
…men no longer…

In time 

The weeds of cultivation

Took back the soil

Scoured the battlefield dirt

Clean.

It was then the poppies bloomed

Among charlock, redshank and corn spurrey.

Before tall, heartbroken foxgloves

They flowed in like the sea on a spring tide

Flooding with old blood again, like rust,

As if the iron ground gave up the colour,

It had so long leached away.

The crop we sowed in those years

And sow still across the world

Never grew from the bones of the dead

But, fed by their blood, sent sad shoots

From the scattered debris of their souls

Struggling upwards to whatever heaven

They might once have hoped to touch.

When we pick their last flowering, 

Remember the blood that made them;

So much red, young blood and the mangled,

Furrowed, earth that swallowed it.

Why would we wear these flowers,

If not for sorrow at wasted lives 

And the horror of their dying,

Or do we parade them to groom

Yet another generation for slaughter?

Poppies in the field bleed away,

Tattered petals fade to brown,

But these man-made things we pin

Instead of hope on our heaving chests

Relentlessly persist.

© BH 2015

---

Lots of poppy stuff going on. It’s that time. Colonel Blimp is with us always, though. It’s become a show these days. Full of puff, rickety with agendas. I don’t go much for such sabre-rattling. It’s an insult to the boys who fell (and still fall) for the supposed greater good, really. Pushed and pulled they were. ‘Given a gun and pushed to the fore.’ It has been a long time like this. The old men failed them. The old men are failing them still. And the young who follow. 

Here I am, an old man. I see the poppies now and I feel a kind of shame.