Long Trenches Poems
Long Trenches Poems. Below are the most popular long Trenches by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Trenches poems by poem length and keyword.
Fields of woe............
Out there among the fields of woe,
Where spirits lie and weep.
The spirits of so many men,
For eternity do sleep.
They fought for peace and freedom,
Queens shilling cupped in hand.
While other nations turned their backs,
Heads buried in the sand.
As I stand among these fields once more,
Where the scarlet poppies grow.
I can feel the hurt and sacrifice,
From those trenches far below.
In those dark, blood laden labyrinths,
Where the souls lay still and deep.
The friends that we remember,
For eternity may sleep........
We will remember them.................................
He fought
Strong and hard
He did
Especially since
He got that letter
He fought
As if
There was no tomorrow
Worth living for
It changed him
It saddened him
He used to laugh
Like a Kookaburra
Even among
All the whistles
Of impending death
Over there
On the Dardanelles
He’d be the one
To cheer the boys up
With a quick Joke
And a smoke
As he passed
In the trenches
But that soon changed
After he got
The letter
He didn’t speak of it
And I
Knew not to ask
It changed him
He fought with more
Vigour, bravery
After he got it
Always the first
To go over the top
Or to run the Nek
How he survived
God only knows
He once said
While he pattered
His breast
If I’m to die
It will tell you
And I knew
He meant
The letter
That sad day came
Not there
But on the fields of Flanders
I lay next to him
In the mud and misery
Shacking
Shacking him
“mate
Come on mate
We’ve come so far
Don’t leave me now
What am I to tell Nellie
I cried
Above the screams
Of shells and yells
On the fields of Flanders
It was only after
He was buried
That I took out
The letter
And read
Tis with great regret
We wish to inform you
Nellie has passed away
She fell from her horse
Mustering a mob
Down by the course
Was then
That I understood
The change
That came over him
Way back then
On the Dardanelles
I turn the letter
Over in my hands
To see
That he had written
If I
Am to die
A forlorn
And forgotten
Death
Upon a foreign shore
Please make sure
You return me
For
I wish
For you
To lay me
Upon
My dear Nellie’s
Breast
I remembered
After I had
Shakenly read
That I
Wanted to cry
But I
Had nothing left
To share or shed
Upon the fields of Flanders
I refold
The letter
And place it
Gently
At the base
Of Nellie’s
Headstone
As close I could
To her Breast
Nature ages like Youth,
a bougainvillea wrapped
around a strapless watch.
Youth doesn’t look at the clock
but ignores passing hours unknowing,
innocent of the melting water.
It leaps and lunges without fear of a fading silhouette,
it smiles with missing teeth,
gaps filled with dreams that will change.
Youth giggles at the simplest of movements,
it blanches under praise -
it drifts along shores, feeling hearing holding then
abandoning the flotsam and jetsam of aging. It is a bundle of
yesterday’s plans
ostracised by calendars,
unaware that friends will leave, as
trenches are dug by
hands, wrinkled.
Youth is a promise milked into creams,
it is a sweating desire to return, rediscover the
suppleness of joints, of bones, of possibility.
Youth has not yet become a mouth that sighs,
is bougainvillea still free from being entwined, twisted and tied.
It is not yet conscious of time as an intangible abstract
forever
Craziest time in virulent living
when protest is black and white to erase
invisibility
when fueled rage overtakes urban pockets of beauty
when the ash from smoking crater anger sears
public spaces
or an insurrection unachors reason
Shifting focus from a virus, hot iron of deep confusion
Pandemic cruelty to the unprotected masses
Indelible marks of worry
Frayed threads of crazy in trenches of stand off
A nightly-news world reduced to sound bites
Are we on the right side of change?
A turnstile that thuds constraints and fury
Hard scrabble life, a gnarly tale
No sleeping bag comfort
in living, oxygen thin
with nothing left to conceal
Hope sustained in the roulette wheel of history
that breakdown is temporal
that an impasse will give voice to the suffering
that things strained heal
Even the iron-cold ground boasts transformation.
Poem revised: October 9, 2021
The Broken Soldier
An old man
Over a hundred years old
Laying in a bed
His mind travels back to a time
He lived a life no one had to live
An ANZAC storming the shores of Turkey
An unknown place called Gallipoli
He watched s his friends died on the beach
His brothers died fighting in the trenches
Blood flowing in rivers
Soldiers running across acres of the dead
While officers hide miles away
Sleeping in the wet trench
He cried a tear for every ANZAC who fell
That time affected him
Seeing so much pain and death
He was never again quite right
The boy as gone
All that was left was a broken soldier
With memories he should not have
Even today
A century later
He still remembers
He has shed a billion tears
But when he dies, he will be happy
He will be with his friends and brothers
Once again, laughing and drinking beer in the pub
And he will be happy
Conversation with the Living Silence
We steal from the mouths of the living dead, we tear out the raw consonants,
and we call theft this harvest of fruits unfelt in the forests,
we call love-on-the-verge-of-forgetting this adoration-in-sweat,
when the dead speak more silently than our noisy silence.
Their sentences shine harshly, carved by thousands of blind tongues,
polished in deep trenches that we fill with new breaths,
I lift a phrase like a light stone heavy as the mountain from muddy water,
still wet with the meanings of a dead writer who still breathes.
"For the well-disorganized mind, life is the great death,"
but whose broken mind? whose life buried in foreign words?
words belong to no one living, to all the dead who speak to us,
a key passed from hand to cold hand until the metal freezes.
Maybe all poetry is stolen from the future that never was,
each word a body that we invoke to be silent more loudly,
each verse a séance where the dead teach us,
the future dead, to speak in the voices of those who will write the world.
We live in the mouths of others, we speak with tongues borrowed in sleep,
and all we say is the echo of an echo that hasn't resounded yet,
the fruits grow back into the trees, the trees descend back into sap,
we climb into the mouths of the dead and they descend into our living mouths.
WORDS DECRIBED THIS
THEY DID NOTHING TO
DETAIL, WHAT THE EYE
REALLY SEE'S
I POSTURED MYSELF TO REDEFINE
EXPERIENCE
I POSTURED MYSELF TO DESCRIBE
WHAT WAS BEFORE ME
IT MAKES EVERYTHING BEFORE IT'S CREATION
INFERIOR
IT'S ARROWS POINT TO ALL DIRECTION
AND THIS ENCOURAGES ALL TO WANT
WISH AND DISCOVER
FOR THE SAKE OF CREATION
IT FILLS CAVITY'S
AND TRENCHES DRY SPACES
IT STANDS STILL
AND GOES PLACES
IT IS TIMELESS
AND EVER GOING
RELENTLESS
AND AWE SHOWING
IT'S AMPLIFIED AND WHISPERED
DIFFERENT AND STRANGE
IT'S RIGHT IN WRONG PLACES
IT WHY THINGS MAKE A CHANGE
IT'S HOW WE WILL DEAL WITH TOMORROW
IT WAS THOUGHT OF YESTERDAY
FROM NOW ON IT SHALL BE SPOKE OF
AS IT WAS HERE ALWAYS
I'm sure most of you
are much too modest to consider
yourselves "heroes," but that's exactly
what you guys are, heroes.
Thank you for all you do
every single day. You're intrepid soldiers
of war, not fought on distant lands,
in an actual battlefield, but in hospitals.
It doesn't make you any less heroic
than American soldiers that do, however.
You nurses and doctors fight to save lives
of COVID-19 victims day-in, day-out
Six of one half a dozen of the other!
Thank you for storming into the trenches
risking your lives fighting such an insidious,
unseen enemy every day.
You put other people's lives ahead
of your own, and your bravery and hard work
are not lost on anyone. America is infinitely
grateful for your tremendous sacrifice.
You deserve all the glory and encomiums
coming your way! Thank you for being
the life-saving heroes that you are.
Keep up the good work!
Date written: 05/06/2020
The trenches are dug,
We gotta go, guys,
Defend our country,
On the other side of the Rhine,
They don’t speak French,
On the other side of the Rhine,
They don’t speak German,
Sprechen Sie Deutsch ?
We gotta go, guys,
To die for a wheat field,
die for a mill,
To die for his children,
We gotta go, guys,
On the other side of the Rhine,
They don’t speak French,
On the other side of the Rhine,
They don’t speak German,
We gotta go, guys,
I could have been born in Saarbrücken,
I could have been born in Neuilly,
What a difference in the bottom,
We gotta kill each other, guys
Like hungry wolves,
Like bloody beasts,
Where’s the humanity, guys?
She’s in our houses,
On the banks of the Seine,
Under the sun of Arles,
It is in the port of Hamburg,
Nobody talks about it,
Humanity is the peace,
Peace is back, guys,
The peace of November 11.
Les tranchées sont creusées,
Il faut y aller les gars,
Défendre notre pays,
De l’autre côté du Rhin,
Ils ne parlent pas français,
De l’autre côté du Rhin,
Ils ne parlent pas allemand,
Il faut y aller les gars,
Mourir pour un champ de blé,
mourir pour un moulin,
Mourir pour ses enfants,
Il faut y aller les gars,
De l’autre côté du Rhin,
Ils ne parlent pas français,
De l’autre côté du Rhin,
Ils ne parlent pas allemand,
Il faut y aller les gars,
J’aurais pu naitre à Sarrebruck,
J’aurais pu naitre à Neuilly,
Quelle différence au fond,
Il faut s’entretuer les gars
Comme des loups affamés,
Comme des bêtes sanglantes,
Où est l’humanité les gars ?
Elle est dans nos maisons,
Sur le bord de la Seine,
Sous le soleil d’Arles,
Elle est dans le port de Hambourg,
Personne n’en parle,
L’Humanité c’est la paix,
La paix retrouvée, les gars,
La paix du onze novembre.
Men and boys answered the call
Some returned home, others did fall
Young volunteers' thought an adventure it would be
Older ones joined up to defend their country.
Constant bombardments' all night and all day
No place to hide, they just had to stay
Stuck in the trenches with mud knee deep
Explosion's and gunfire, no chance could they sleep.
Some were injured and they sent them away
Others not so lucky and they died that day
Conditions were atrocious, with fire and rain
With disease and vermin adding to their pain.
Freedom they bought us but paid a heavy price
And they'd do it again, they wouldn't think twice
But we live in a land now that's happy and free
And we remember the sacrifice they gave for their country.