Anzacs Red Baron Cinema Sound Stage General About Links

Poems
Attack
In Flanders fields
The Hero
Out West
The letter
The dreamers
Song-books of the war
The one-legged man
Break of day
The next war
Base details
The General
The chances
Quo vadis Anzac?
Copyright notices

 

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy

To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens ?
What quaver--what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in man's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe--
Just a little white with the dust.


 

 


Isaac Rosenberg

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