Wipers

A few years ago now, I went on a tour of battlesites and war graves in northern France and Belgium. It made a deep impression on me, that at the time I was unable to satisfactorily put into words. I'm still not entirely happy with it, but here it is, warts and all.


Wipers

I am standing in a foreign field, on a patch of emerald turf,

Above me are the high blue skies, around, the cultivated earth.

It might be anywhere, an innocent pastoral reverie,

The peacefulness belied by the incongruous sight in front of me;

Island amidst the gently canted fields, there stands a tended plot,

A strange sort of garden with granite walls, and grass so neatly cropped

It could almost be a bowling green, with parallel flower beds,

For the benefit of visitors to the unvictorious dead.

Beneath the unknowing, heedless sky lie the slain of two world wars.

Surrounded by the noise of birds and farms, there is a muted pause

In the diurnal humdrum that erodes the hours and days and years,

And with them dulls the immediacy of war’s many brutal fears.

So soon the lessons war has taught are buried, rushed to early graves,

In the efforts to forget the bad, the baby is thrown away

With the bathwater. To forget everything, to spit on these men,

And the sacrifice they made to stop this happening again.