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From “Trench Poems”
THE DARKNESS crumbles away— | |
| It is the same old Druid Time as ever. | |
| Only a live thing leaps my hand— | |
| A queer sardonic rat— | |
| As I pull the parapet’s poppy | 5 |
| To stick behind my ear. | |
| Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew | |
| Your cosmopolitan sympathies | |
| (And God knows what antipathies). | |
| Now you have touched this English hand | 10 |
| You will do the same to a German— | |
| Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure | |
| To cross the sleeping green between. | |
| It seems you inwardly grin as you pass: | |
| Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes, | 15 |
| Less chanced than you for life; | |
| Bonds to the whims of murder, | |
| Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, | |
| The torn fields of France. | |
| What do you see in our eyes | 20 |
| At the boom, the hiss, the swiftness, | |
| The irrevocable earth buffet— | |
| A shell’s haphazard fury. | |
| What rootless poppies dropping?….. | |
| But mine in my ear is safe, | 25 |
| Just a little white with the dust. | |
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