One hundred years

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.

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M / English

Notes: 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.

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