Owen Sheers, "Mametz Wood"

For years afterwards the farmers found them --
the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades
as they tended the land back to itself.

A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade,
the relic of a finger, the blown
and broken bird's egg of a skull --

all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white
across this field where they were told to walk, not run, towards the
wood and its nesting machine guns.

And even now the earth stands sentinel;
reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened, like a wound
working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.

This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave,
a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm,
their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre

in boots that outlasted them.
Their socketed heads tilted back at an angle,
and their jaws (those that have them) dropped open,

as if the notes they had sung
have only now with this unearthing,
slipped from their absent tongues.



Owen Sheers

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