War Artist

World War 1 I scrawl these visions in the light of exploding shells and the grey sleep of a million corpses, making my pencil the last witness to the moments between life and death. Truth shall guide my trembling hand across a blank canvass that will inherit this day’s memory of pain. A transformation in the dark colours of suffering that echoes the sounds of war to a respectable audience, taking their morning tea in England. The epitaph of a race captured in a wooden pencil sharing the blood of mankind in another holy grail. Come drink this sweet wine of youth for it will never empty. My pencil denied by the colours of life creates glory on a foreign field. The sons of mothers pose in deaths final picture, frozen for winter to play. Till the heat of summer takes them away on blue bottle wings to heaven. A rotten imprint to torment the living. They were once human as I remember who came with wit and clean socks seeking the approval of father. All were looking for a road to be a man but the road was a trench, whose veins pulsated with the blood of the dead giving birth to the shadows of tomorrow. Shadows, shadows all is shadows the pencil can tell no lies. Life turned into spectres and flies haunting the conscience of mankind. We are no longer human beings war in the trenches dulls the meaning of life. Death is but a serial number and a victory for tomorrow’s paper. Life wasted in Judas visions for all to see. And I who live in fear cannot see the lines of humanity anymore. Only images seeded in a fractured brain whose portfolio burns in the corpse that was once my soul. This pencil has done its duty The reaper can take these eyes, eyes that see the shadows dancing in the flickering flames of war. A light that bears witness to my last heart beat in the scribbles of a dying man. My destiny foretold in my work to spend eternity in the darkness that surrounds the stars, with a pencil that can draw no light. Pass gently dear comrades from this earth, time is the watch which knows no end. Only the blind and the dead will hear the last tick of this illusion. For silence is the secret of the earth everything dies, everything dies.