Apr 2014
A man-made cave of brutal grey
Damp and dark on sunlit day
Void of what it used to be
Yet a thousand souls I seem to see
Oppressed I felt I must escape
So through narrow door my way I make
A few steps more on grassy knoll
To sit, and breathe, and take control
I stare across the open fields
Wide and flat, and Poplar healed
I want to write
Yet words won’t come
For in this place all words are done
Upon this knoll, one long past day
Were penned the words of John McCrae
So instead I ponder field’s banks
Fresh turned earth in neat trim ranks
And watch the flowers bob their heads
With diaphanous petals
Of deep blood red.
RD © 2014
Damp and dark on sunlit day
Void of what it used to be
Yet a thousand souls I seem to see
Oppressed I felt I must escape
So through narrow door my way I make
A few steps more on grassy knoll
To sit, and breathe, and take control
I stare across the open fields
Wide and flat, and Poplar healed
I want to write
Yet words won’t come
For in this place all words are done
Upon this knoll, one long past day
Were penned the words of John McCrae
So instead I ponder field’s banks
Fresh turned earth in neat trim ranks
And watch the flowers bob their heads
With diaphanous petals
Of deep blood red.
RD © 2014
Today, my wife and youngest daughter are on a school trip visiting Ypres. About five years ago I made the same trip with our eldest daughter. Amongst many places we visited was the Essex Farm Dressing Station and I admit that quite soon I found it’s atmosphere oppressive and so sat outside about 20 feet away on the grass bank of field, where Poppies were growing in newly ploughed earth. I tried to write something then, to imagine, but no words came. So I took a photograph of the closest poppy instead and it was only when I was walking back to the coach that I saw the inscription that explained how John McCrae, Canadian Army surgeon, had just failed to save his friend in the dressing station and came outside to sit awhile, where he wrote “In Flanders Fields” (3rd May 1915). And I knew all the words had already been used for this place.
