It's Still Life

Trônes Wood: The Somme

They expected the heavens
to fall. The stars to wail.
Expected the night
to rupture white,
smite their eyes
and pour down ice.

They feared their own creation.
Now we fear our own forgiveness.

We’ve lost their lessons
in long green grass,
in wide meadows of rye,
and in tin-tune birdsong.
Those lessons, too porous,
lost on the honour of dead.

Many years ago, I visited Deville and Trônes Wood where one the battles of The Somme took place. Today it is a quiet and restful place. Fields that whisper like crinoline underskirts. Birds singing in high voices. But it was once a bloody battlefield, the forest cut down by ammunition fire. Men dead, dying, forgotten, stepped-over, robbed … I shivered in the August heat. I shivered for days.

Written for Whitman’s Civil War: Writing and Imaging Loss, Death, and Disaster, Class 2 assignment.