Long Flanders Poems
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This was once a sea of mud
Where thousands bled!
Before it reverted to!
A field of Flanders Poppy Red.
Do lines of ghostly squaddies!
Plough through ethereal mire!
In an endless quest to!
Charge the enemy barbed wire.
Do Mill Bombs explode!
As machine guns bark!
Sending many of the brave!
Into death's final dark.
How many bodies sank
Into that glutinous paste
Just futile victims of
A futile war's waste.
Do those shades fight bravely
Or do they fight with despair
Knowing it was sheer folly
That they were ever there.
The Flanders Poppy thrives
It's vivid scarlet red
An enduring tribute to those
Many brave but wasted dead.
And the massed white tombstones
In their precise lines and ranks
Are tended with love and care
In sincere but inadequate thanks
17 October 1916 the Battle of The Somme enterd its 109th day and had 32 more to run. It lasted 141 day in total. It saw the first use of the tank in battle, and extensive use of air power.
Casualties: British and Empire: 420,000, French: 200,000, German: between 434,000 and 500,000.
It was classed as “inconclusive.”
100 Years On I feel like crying/
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
Memorial Day 2000
Dedicated
to
Those Left Standing
Written: by Tom Wright
5/8/00
Monuments,
Fashioned of assorted granite stone,
Neatly standing,
As if in manicured rows;
A memorial,
To friends and loved one's gone,
Their numbers uncontrollable,
For each year it always grows.
Oft times from deep in solitude,
In sadness, I'm reminded,
And at mere sight
Of one small flag;
I swell with pride
And oft by tears am blinded.
Desperately trying in my spirit,
Not to brag.
I, in deepest thought,
On this 2000 Memorial Day,
Am silently taken back
To the place of Flanders Field,
Where neat white crosses
Stand by the way,
As if cloned, among red poppies,
It's only living yield.
I see a Moving Wall
Meticulously chiseled in granite black;
Bearing Viet Nam casualties,
Each, remembered by name;
I think of those yet living,
And about their lack;
As for their treatment,
We all must share some blame.
Those, perhaps,
Once forced to fight a war.
Said by many,
To have been unjust;.
But duty bound to country,
In that land afar,
In God's hands,
Put their lives and trust.
To those of Desert Storm
Having experienced combat days,
I shall endeavor to remember
Those who fell,
And those,
Yet baring scars of war in another way;
Those haunted by tormented faces,
Scud Missiles and deaths smell.
Hero's who served,
And gallantly died;
To those I cannot express,
The trappings of my heart;
To those who served,
And returned with pride
Let thanks, gratitude and prayers,
Be my humble start.
NOVELTIES
by Thomas Campion
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Booksellers laud authors for novel editions
as pimps praise their whores for exotic positions.
This is my translation of a Latin epigram by the English poet Thomas Campion. In Campion’s era some English poets continued to write poems in Latin and/or Greek. For instance, John Milton and Andrew Marvell wrote poems in Latin, while Shakespeare was criticized by Ben Jonson, if I remember things correctly, for having “little” Greek and Latin.
Not being “versed” in the senior languages was seen as a deficiency in literary circles back then. Shakespeare was called an “upstart crow” for daring to write “litter-chure” without a proper university degree. How could he properly quote the ancients if he couldn’t read them in their original languages? The Bard of Avon was doomed to failure and obscurity … or perhaps not, since the English language was finally in vogue in England (where for centuries English kings had been unable to read, write or even speak the mother tongue, preferring French, Latin and Greek).
My title is a bit of a pun, because novels were new to the world when they first arrived, and were thus considered by the literary elites to be “novelties” not on par with more serious verse plays. Some of the more popular early novels were “subversive” (pardon the pun) explorations of sexual naughtiness, through characters like Tom Jones, Moll Flanders, et al.
Campion probably didn’t have such campy (enough with the puns, already!) novels in mind when he wrote his epigram, since the more titillating (cease! desist!) ones had yet to arrive. But perhaps he would prove to be a “profit” (I’m udderly hopeless!).
Keywords/Tags: Campion, Latin, translation, exotic, exoticism, epigram, novels, novelties, book, books, booksellers, publishers, write, writing, author, authors, poet, poets, poetry, poems, pimps, whores, prostitutes, prostitution, exotic, positions, extended metaphor
You guys never laughed at me for spoiling you rotten in glee
With spilt milk over nothing as if I created exquisite novel cuisine
Of course your applause was quite muted because of the padding
Maybe you secretly chuckled when I debated in adamant earnest
Whether one glove fits all gourmets when brave experiments failed
And which mitt belonged to what hand and if I was wrong to decide
Never got out when my kitchen looked like a belligerent reminder
Of insane propositions to marry hunger with delicate opulence
When more shells crisped up the omelette than shrapnel in Flanders
And bloody meat hid inside beef scorched from heated exchange
While recipes for disaster disguised as some deep fried Trojan horse
Butchered taste buds scorned with pleasure lost in hell’s paradise
More than once you whispered ‘do not put your head in the oven’
Switched of the gas as if by itself and encouraged me to keep trying
When the lights went out you told me a story of blueberry muffins
Presented to Odysseus emerging from an underworld of despair
Caressed me into holding pots pans scourers and bedlam together
Even under looming death from friendly fire and collateral damage
Now that I live to tell the tale of surrender you carry an olive branch
More holes than fabric punctured into a fading emblem of design
I rest you in peace on a tree in the garden where you dance in the wind
With old tea mugs and measuring cups full of promise and compassion
10th May 2020
who isn’t you
wise readers
will know the difference
I want a narrator
more unsettling
than Nabokov created
for ‘Lolita’
I want a narrator
to cringe at
while sympathizing with
I need “milk plus”
from ‘Clockwork Orange’
while I learn the dialect
of Anthony Burgess
before I ruin Beethoven
It takes sustained energy
to hate a character
while never forgetting them
“My vanity
was the cause
of it”
I still wink at you,
Moll Flanders
a woman too clever
for shallow understanding
My “androgynous mind”
will have to be enough
for adequate love,
Virginia Woolf
I have all the worst intentions:
devious dialog
with peppered,
cutting
fashion statements
to make phantom readers
laugh and scowl
Cruella Deville
taught me everything
one late afternoon
in August
while we hunted swans
over toast points
and caviar
Only when we have felt, even once,
the clawed caress of strife,
do we value the soft warm hand
of peaceful days in our life.
Give me boredom and humdrum
over adventure and interesting times;
a quiet corner in a calm house
to write and edit my rhymes.
Oh, war has driven the pen stroke
and sorrow versed in the bomb strike,
but I’d rather read all about it
in a book and only imagine what it’s like,
than breathe the smoke of burning -
the death scent of a home.
I do not need to personally bleed
to scratch out a war-time poem.
Better to write of cows and apples,
than Flanders field and poppies;
to write of a Luve like a red, red rose,
than a requiem for the Croppies;
and though the poet much values his words
I’ll bet that each war-torn bard
would’ve chosen to write first hand in the soft
than ink pain in the trench of the hard.
Famished and flagging footsoldiers;
facing fatigue, fitful fever,
faeces and foul, foetid fungi.
Fostering feelings, frustrated,
for this faraway, foreign field.
Forays so fraught with fine failure;
forfeiting furtive and fiendish,
fatally fettered from the first.
Forged by such fatuous fawners,
for folly to feud for a field.
Forced forwards with fleetness of foot;
firearms flash and fragments fly far,
feigning the firmament aflame.
Forces fight so ferociously,
fratricide set free on this field.
Forthright and filial feelings;
families of fine forefathers,
fought fiercely, for fear we’d forget.
Familiar flora forms focus,
for the fallen in Flanders Field.
- - - - - - - - -
8 syallables on every line (www.howmanysyllables.com)
November 2018
Entered in Brian Strand's "Contest No 515".
(1st Place)
I wanted to do something special - and a bit different - to mark the centenary of the end of The Great War (11 November 1918). This poem is dedicated to all the brave souls lost defending freedom during that terrible conflict (and all conflicts since).
"We are the dead. Short days ago
We loved, felt dawn and saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved ...."
By _ Lt. Col. John McCrae (In Flanders Field) 1915
________________
Let me tell you a story . . .
I recall a little boy who played in the sandbox
and drove me crazy most of the time
I had to chase him everywhere
but he had a dream to be a soldier
a Canadian Peace Keeper
we, the family were proud but frightened also
Dad would say, he is a peacekeeper so he will be okay
anyone who tells you peacekeepers do not die
is lying because they do ...
my little brother came home in a box
like so many he fought in a battle far, far from home
I visit his grave often
passing the rows and rows of white stone military markers
my great grandpa fought in WWI
I have a photograph of him in uniform
my grandpa fought in WW2
he never spoke of what he saw
grandma said he came back a changed man
I think a lot about all the men and women who go to war
who have given their lives for peace
wish I could go to Flanders Field Cemetery
and see the 12,000 crosses row after row
is war to be part of this life forever
for, it seems there is always a war somewhere
I read somewhere that
the poppies are dying in Flanders Field
_____________________
November 13, 2021
Poetry/Narrative/Where Poppies Grow
Copyright Protected, ID 11-1606-322-13
All Rights Reserved, 2021, Constance La France
Written for the Premier contest, War
sponsor, Kai Michael Neumann, Judged 12/22/2021
Seventh Place
"We are the Dead. Short days ago.
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow.
Loved and were loved, and now we lie.
In Flanders fields. "
Quote By _ John McCrae (Flanders Fields)
on the eleventh month, on the eleventh day, at the eleventh hour
under a blue hazy sky in my city
we honored those who answered the call and died
for the peace and freedom that we enjoy today
we have a beautiful war monument and statue
and a tomb of the unknown soldier
that we treasure everyday not just on November eleventh
all the wars are engraved in stone
World War I, World War II, The Korean War, Afghanistan
and it honors the peacekeepers who lost their life's also
the sound of the bands, the parade of branches of the military
the 21-gun salute, and the jet fly over, and the choir singing
the pipers and trumpet, breaks the silence of those standing tall
and when it is over everyone removes their poppies
and places them on the tomb of the unknown soldier
like red tears cascading
____________________
November 11, 2022
Submitted to the contest, 2022 Poetry Marathon, Mile 25
sponsor, Mark Toney