Perfect
from root to flower.
From
swollen feet,
sunk
in the soft, deep mud of these raped farms
that
kept you in trenches
unable
to move on,
up
through your leaves
dressed
out in just that tone of green
that
when it touched your skin
could
show with certainty that death had come
to
ease your suffering and take you home
up
to your fragile flower
paper
thin, trembling with the shock of war
and
its bulls-eye, grainy and black
signing
an entry wound
perfect
in head or heart
that
brought in sudden quiet
instant
transition from the muddy hell
maybe
to lightness and to Light.
Though
most of you crawled off in long, slow moving pain
life
slowly leaking back to earth
joining
a lonely choir of screams and groans
crying
for mother or for God
as
you lay out in perfect agony,
hour
after hour alone
waiting for death
unless
some kind sharp-shooter from your side,
maddened
by screaming babes,
could
pin your forehead with a poppy hole
or
some quiet Quaker crawled to you
to
give you opium and bring you home.
Cut
poppies bleed the cure for pain.
In
complex shame, their head hangs down;
there's
not enough in all of Flanders' fields
to
meet the needs of war,
or quieten leaders' minds.
Insanity
still rules the world of men
still
we take perfect orders from above
' our
inner selves can sense is false
still
we pour out out onto the ground
a
bitter sacrifice of human blood,
and trembling hearts are torn
by
priests of paper power
held
up to angry skies
on
knives of lies and false ideas.
Still
we obey.
©
Richard Lawson
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