Today upon these very fields
Meadows of green and flowers yield
As breeze stops dead and from the leaves
Comes a young girl in khaki green.
Her dress is light, and her song is sweet
As she picks her way on dainty feet.

But she is not the first to trek
Through fresh-scented woods with curling breath
In khaki green amidst the sea
Of indigo and white and brightest green.

For as she scrabbles amongst dirt and stone
She finds in her hand to be a bone.
Unknowing of the man that shed it like
A moulting woodlark born for flight.

Unknowing too is she of the dew
That clings to blades of grass as slew
Were brothers of flesh and blood and heart.
What once was clouded red is glass.

She rises as the night descends,
Skips home with grubby hands and dress
But she is the only one in khaki green
Whom after those woods was ever seen.

The forest left to whistle and sway
Waits for the girl tomorrow-day
When she will escape its clutches once more
Dancing on the graves of twenty-four.

I watched the coal-black smoke
of the ancient chimney
as it chased a messianic dream
swirling up the smoggy expanse
to the freedom of the blue sky
for a lungful of sanity.

I watched the gloom
of the soot-smeared boy
in tattered khaki
as he longed for the dark wings of smoke
to take him on its pilgrimage to freedom.

Withered by the corrupting fumes of the chimney
he lay there.

With no hands to hold to the smoke
as it spiralled up,
with no breath to feel
the freedom of the azure sky,
he lay there.

Like a faint twig
feeding the wrath of a funeral pyre
he lay there!