Blood Masks the Lea

Blood masks the lea, the blasted loam upon whose breasts soldiers came home. The earth, herself, held each to chest the mist of sky killed with each breath as ruined green became their tomb. Men strafed by shells and gassed by fume: cast akimbo, blown to their doom entrenched, barb fenced; death coalesced; blood masks the lea. Eight million French, their valor shown; most shy twenty lay beneath stone: Russians, Brits, Italians, Yanks, rest thirty seven million, our best slaughtered and listed in old tomes; blood masks the lea. An Ekphrastic done as a French Rondeau after:Flanders Fields by John McCrae