Lianes Poems

Poppies Among the Crosses

Fields of France are filled with blood-red poppies
Where also bloom the lily-white crosses:
Each buried youth a seed, now bursting forth 
Into a stark white cruciform flower:
Row upon row, rank after serried rank,
A spiky grid overlying acre 
After acre in silent panoply,
Swan-mute as stillborns, yet shrieking their pain.
A century has failed to lay their griefs.

But such gardens aren’t anywise unique.
On every continent, in every age,
The fields are sown:  and so among the trees
And forests, steppes and prairies, cities
And wastelands, the precious seed is planted,
The harvest bitter in its barrenness.
Instead of poppies, palms or rank lianes,
Brush or tundra, timber, sedge or seaweed
Grow where crosses never got to flower:
Even those gaunt reminders are missing
To give their witness to the seed thus sown,
The sacrifice and sacred blood there spent. 

And so it goes: so it’s been since people
First appeared. And will go on: tomorrow
And the day after, still the sowing will 
Continue. Perhaps someday our wisdom 
And compassion may grow enough to wean
Us of this savage, mindless husbandry:
Today, it seems a thousand years away.