A rumbling,
Echoes across the shattered wasteland
Acid snow drifts in the caustic air
Past my helmet visor.

My gas filter rattles
As I **** in the foul air,
The next wave is coming
Great war machines,
Chugging slowly toward our battered dugouts.

And for what?
A body of unpolluted water
Barely wide enough to step over,
Or a tiny stretch of untainted farmland.

I sit in my ramshackle bunker
With my comrades,
Checking my rifle one last time,
Knowing in my heart, that we
Can't push back the next assault.

I sit silently cursing my ancestors,
For leaving me this god-forsaken legacy
For shattering my Earth.

As the first shells start to fall.

Oh,
my heart
is yearning
to see you smile,

to hear your
sweet voice,
your laugh

like radiant
sunshine
piercing through
my cloudy days

I find my mind
drifting,
dreaming,
of you

and you'll never
know,
can never know

oh fate
how cruel
that keeps
us
apart

us?
no
only me,
alone
and dreaming of you.

A pitiful heap
of emaciated bodies

Unceremoniously discarded
into a vast mass grave

Falling limp and lifeless
like marionettes with strings so brutally cut

I close my eyes to shut out the horror
but I can still see them

What seems an eternal nightmare
has lasted but a day

An aching vista
strewn with wreckage
and drowning in mud

stretched out
like the entrails
of a gutted and dying landscape

soiled in the blood
of the young
sent to die

one by one
yard by yard
dropping like leaves

their cries snatched
from their chests in gusts
crimson flowers blossoming in turn

amid the graves
dug and filled
by a deluge of whistling shells