Here, and over here -
The fortunate sons

Those who made it home
To fields and hills of native tongue
In the soil their people toiled
- They listen quietly when we come


There, and over there -
Beneath crossed lines too many

Still - they man the trenches
Along the Marne and Somme
Below the woods of Belleau
And the forest of Argonne

No sonnets in a foreign language
Rendered where they languish -
The distant rest far and away
In a cold November grave


We should remember
Here and there
The old lie -

And the young.

r ~ 11/11/14

Holed up in a bunker, a soldier dreams that the war is over.
It's just poetic justice, a dream for an emerging new dawn.

See, every soldier defying orders, leaves the post and embrace
the one whom he was made to think as enemy in his naivety
they dance in the no man's land, where they plant a rose garden

With them aloud, let's chant,"Bury the guns fellas, war is a tale
told by perverts of the worst kind, just to sell deadly warheads.
that **** happiness, book the culprits that make war, allow them not
to fornicate truth, blatantly like this, deceive the world , gift turmoil."

Dead voices in the head
of a frightened madman

starts humming like electric wires
in wild winter storms.

bursting and cracking like melting ice
in a warm spring thaw

insistent, pollen-drunk bees
buzzing round hot summer hives

grumbling and gathering
swirling eddies of autumn leaves

dancing schizophrenic death
in the breath of city streets.

© M.L.Emmett