Thursday, May 12, 2011

This last war

* this last was *
The rapid chatter of machine guns
Sharp piercing crack of sniper's rifle
Whirring shrill call of shrapnel flying
The Western Front audible
Is in no sense or fact adorable
On no day or in any season
Is there a meaning or a reason
Worthy for these bodies stacked
To excuse the last or next attack
And all here exist in mud drowning
Or mud dried hard as rock
Fine farmland ploughed by shovel or shell
Into an unproductive unforgiving soldiers hell
We always sleep less than we should
Gas mask eternally close at hand
In case evil we think of our fellow man
Is proven true in blinding choking fog
Recall those who we have already seen
Eyes dead and lungs obscene
Such a wheezing those blind comrades release
Each breath they take makes a fit man shudder
But for grace of God you could be another
How would it be to return home like that
You would wish a well aimed shell
Or a sniper's bullet through helmeted head
Before such a perpetually dying fate
We came to fight and have learnt this modern war
Is as capricious and as unfair
As any war there ever was before
We rarely see our foe and only feel his threat
Through raining shells or scything bullets
Mechanised and manufactured in all we do
The homeland factories on either side
Lend brilliance and efficiency
To getting the munitions to the front
Ensure they are in constant supply
So we dug in eight feet deep
Can be slaughtered and can die
Matters not which side a soldier sits
Reaper reaps this generation grown
Seems all the men in all the world
Born from 1875 to 1900 beneath this Flander's earth
Shall be ploughed by mechanized manufactured might
The new age this is
A final war to teach men peace
A lesson taught on scarred and battered earth
To rhythm of machine guns
And sharp crack of sniper's rifle.

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