“World War One Daffodils”

(With apologies to Bill Wordsworth)

by  Manic Martin

Published: June 22, 2009

I wander’d lonely as a cloud
Of deadly choking chlorine gas
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of dead, a dying mass.
Beside the tank, beneath the wire,
Faint gasps and cries rose from the mire.

Continuous as the blood that flows
From fatal wounds and open cuts
They stank a stench to twist your nose
Of rancid rents and rotting gut
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Rolling and crawling in deathly dance.

The gun beside them fired but they
Just stared from broken eyeless skulls
And if the firing died away
You might hear screaming in the lulls
I gazed and gazed and little thought
What misery one death had brought.

For oft, when in my trench I sit
In vacant or in pensive mood
I think of war, the whole of it
Of vice and hurt and tortures crude
And then my heart with sorrow fills
For men and guns and all their ills

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