The Poppy Fields

A sonnet about the poppy fields that replaced the battlefields of World War One.

What was here before? Before the cries,

Of the dying and the crackling of guns?

Long since the wind carried their hapless sighs,

The sky clouded by smoke. Thousands of suns,

Have risen, yet the fields still bleed for fallen men.

The earth sodden in blood they could not keep.

With every late spring bloom, they bleed again.

The proof is in the morning dew they weep.

Some tall, some small, loyalties not at all,

Clear in their colour. United in painful,

Ends and serving righteous duty. What a gall!

Glorious war is for the gullible.

The earth, too scarred to hold another seed,

Can do nothing else but bleed, bleed, bleed.