"verdun" poems
See, you hear this word and shiver
While some of us get problems of the liver
yup! Exams are what I'm talking about
The reason pupils start howling about
Oh exams! What do we do with you
As it approaches, students be like
A reaction no one ever seen like
In our dreams like a monster sneaks up
Within our soul like Death creaps up
Oh exams! What do we do with you
That one night before exam burden
Reminds me of the war of verdun
Only if had books borrowed or lend
All night were the eyes to suspend
Oh exams! What do we do with you
That, to be murdered day arrived
Of peaceful sleep were we deprived
When the exam hall were we to enter
Shot a bullet shrapnel in the center
Dead were we when we turned the paper
Those questions turned us into vapor
Students like us had two or three attempted
Handed over those 2 sheets and left all exempted
Oh exams! What do we do with you
You're welcome, now to hell with you
Sep 17, 2017
Sep 17, 2017 at 3:49 AM UTC
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work --
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
4.6k
I hate the beach
I'm eighty six and I hate the beach
Hate the sand, not a fan of the surf
Face it, I hate the beach
Last time I went there
I had just turned 18 years old
June sixth, Nineteen Hundred Forty Four
God, I hate the beach
I was in the 5th Regiment
Régiment de Maisonneuve
and I've never been to a beach since
I'm from Verdun, Quebec, Canada
Not many beaches around there
Thank the lord for that I say
We'd been training for six months
Operation Overlord it was called
We were coming in on troop carriers
It was to be a beach head landing
I'd never seen a beach before
At least not for real
Never want to see another
We arrived early June 6, 1944
I think I said that already
You must forgive me,
I'm 86 years old and I hate the beach
fourteen thousand Canadian Troops
Bursting out of armoured troop ships
Like, the young, virile, brahma bulls we were
Coming in, all I could hear was the waves
I was in front, well...close to the front
I remember, there were no birds
who ever heard of that?
A beach with no birds
At least not at this beach
I could smell the salt in the air
And I knew I could hear the surf
And my heart, I could **** well hear that
But, no birds, I couldn't hear the birds
Gunfire, nope...cannons and mortars
But birds and guns, not a sound
Weird huh?
I remember running forward
Always forward, past blocks
Wood barricades and barbed wire
And bodies, lots of bodies
I knew that I knew some of them
I just didn't have time to stop
And say goodbye,
I just ran
Emptied my weapon at least once
I only know this, because it was empty
when I hit the beach
God, I hate the beach
You know in the movies
or in those flowery books
where they talk about someone being shot
and how "there was a bloom or
they're chest flowered red where they were hit"
I never saw that, never looked back
Just ran forward, saw the "bloom" in their backs
Don't like red, or flowers or the beach
I don't remember much after that
Could still hear my heart
That's a good thing, I guess
I got tore up good with the wire
but I never got shot
Never, "bloomed" for anyone
A few of my buddies were lost
I toast them every year
Never at the beach though
I hate the beach
Wife and kids used to go
I never did, never will
I remember the 50th anniversary though
Wife and kids went back
Not me,
Went into Montreal to see a ball game
Montreal Expos 10, Houston Astros 5
I remember Will Cordero hitting a homer
It was the sixth inning, I toasted the hit
I thought about that day 50 years before
And went back to watching the game
I hate the beach
My name is Gilles Roquefort
I'm eight six years old
And I can still feel the sand and taste the salt
On a bad day.
Oct 31, 2012
Oct 31, 2012 at 7:06 PM UTC
Imagine yourself a red ceramic Poppy,
placed with care into the English soil.
One hundred years ago you were a soldier,
a frightened teen in a chaotic world.
You’d been sent, by King’s command, into the battle-
A mindless melee John French thought he’d won.
Perhaps some yards of France had been reclaimed
at a mind numbing cost of mothers’ sons.
You were one of those shot, gassed or burned.
Hit by a shell and blown to kingdom come.
(In ‘fourteen they had funerals for the fallen.
Mass burials became the norm before Verdun.)
That’s how you went from the playing fields of Eton
to an unmarked grave somewhere in Northern France.
So now you are a red ceramic poppy,
a symbol of an Empire, now passed.
Placed in English soil by teenaged hands.
one of nine hundred thousand home at last.
Jul 30, 2014
Jul 30, 2014 at 6:08 AM UTC
Joe Mole, Marnhull Danny
1974
His eyes were luminous steel blue, alive
with twinkling shards of mischievous fun.
His face, a weathered map of his long life:
brown and crumpled, carved by clean air and sun.
A grubby khaki flat-cap, jauntily askew,
bedraggled grey-green ancient jacket
secured with hairy binder-twine (calves too),
brown dungarees, muddy boots and thumb-stick.
His gruesome work was in grazing meadows
under attack from an invasion beneath
of unwelcome little furry fellows
destined to perish between steel-sprung teeth.
Tiny corpses hung in a row (job done)
on barbed wire like Joe met at Verdun.
A Danny was the name given to any man from the village of Marnhull in Dorset. The word was in common use locally during the 1970’s but is now rarely heard.
14 lines
(FBRSO)
Copywrite: Craig Andrew White,Author, July 2011.
Jul 12, 2011
Jul 12, 2011 at 2:41 PM UTC
she brings him tea,
a piece of cheese late morn
for he has been toiling since dawn
his plane shaving the wood reverently
the old oak speaking, though not complaining,
in a language the man does not understand
a coughing code for loss, forbearance, acceptance,
redemption, he hopes, for the boys keep coming…
first from Ypres, the Verdun,
now the Marne
before, he heaved hewn planks
for the hopeful homes, built their pantries
to be filled with the bread, the kind milk
now the sawn boards are for those who once
watched his labors, but no longer hear the simple
sounds of sanding, sawing
or anything at all
most of the lads do not come home,
their souls and bodies left to rot on the blood sullied grass
or buried shallow, naked in the French soil, but all get a fine coffin
thanks to the carpenter’s wife, whose babe was the first to fall,
who demands for them all, a holy horizontal home to be built
and, empty or not, placed gently in Anglican ground
May 8, 2014
May 8, 2014 at 2:30 PM UTC
Old Harold lived on the second floor
In a darkened room with an old locked door.
My cousins and I used to tease him there,
And he’d chase us out, give us a scare.
I didn’t know exactly who he was,
“He’s a mean old man,” said my favorite cos’.
“Grandma let him live here after Grandpa died.
She doesn’t even like him and we don’t know why.”
When he was out we would take a peek.
Around the ocher walls and his bed we’d sneak.
There was nothing but an iron bunk
And a glass-front chest filled with lots of junk.
One day Old Harold must have complained
About our pestering…we really were pains!
But no parent’s lecture could keep us away.
And Grandma’s yelling at him not to stay.
Old Uncle Harold disappeared for years.
We would make up stories for littler ears.
But one day my father had news of him.
He lived with “a harlot” and his checks she’d skim.
I was old enough to know what it meant
And asked Dad why uncle Harold seemed bent.
“He was gassed in the War in a field at Verdun.”
Dad told me in a tone that left me stunned;
“And was then sent around to pick up the dead.
With the gas and the horror, his mind just went.”
Now I recalled all the times we had teased
And agonized him when we should have pleased.
But now it was too late to apologize,
He was so lost, he wouldn’t recognize
His grown tormentors, when he hardly
Knew my father, the kindly mentor,
Who visited him every week,
Who paid for anything to make him last,
And reminded him of better times past;
Telling him of the time he caught a butterfly
And brought it to show the girls and guys.
How he wanted to let it fly away,
But when the boys had killed it anyway.
He cried and was called a coward then,
And as my father spoke and wept again.
Old Uncle Harold died alone
In a sterile, cold-floored nursing home.
None but Dad came to grieve
And I, only an hour away, shunned
the feeling and just felt numb,
Until Dad called and told me the story
Of Harold’s death and only then
Could I say, “I’m sorry!” to his ghost.
I should have said it long ago; the one who
Maddened him least repented the most.
If I could say “Sorry” for the times we made him shout.
I realised he’d just have yelled, “Get the hell out!”
Dec 3, 2018
Dec 3, 2018 at 11:00 AM UTC
In Neverland - never to grow old
never to marry that sweetheart
never to have children and grandchildren
nor watch hair thin and grey.
Full of derring-do - more dash than discipline
lanky and loose-limbed they swank and saunter
not like soldiers at all
no doff the cap humility
to the old rules and distant monarchies.
From a newly stolen world
hardly secured or steady with itself
lodged on the edge of a vast continent
clinging to a rim of turquoise blue.
Now cramped
in the pock-holed sores of ancient lands
richly bone-dusted from time to time.
Waiting for the fight to end
to go ‘back home’ ‘over there’
to farms and factories; schools and stations.
Still there - left behind
in the archipelago of cemeteries
as far as Fromelles, Pozieres,
to Bullencourt and Paschendaele
in fields of beetroot and corn,
fields bleeding red with poppies
beside the Menin Road at Ypres
in bluebelled woods of Verdun
in the silt of the Somme
on the plains of Flanders
in the victory graves at Amiens
Monash’s boys - the lost boys
cried for their mothers
begged for water
screamed to die
hung like khaki bundles on the wire.
Commanded by Field Marshalls
who never went to the fields,
who played the numbers game
in a war of bluff and bluster,
who never touched the dirt and slime,
nor waded through the ****** slush
of broken men and boys,
never waist-deep in mud and sinking,
wounded and drowning in that shambles of a war
Wearing dead men’s boots
and shrapnel-holed helmets
tunics and leggings splattered and rotting
with dead men’s blood and brains
Some haunted boys came home
knapsacks full of secret pictures,
old rusty tins crammed with suffering
breast pockets held their grief
wrapped in shroud-shreds.
They brought their duckboard demons
to the world of peace
Gas-choked fretful lungs still brought
the caustic fumes with every breath exhaled
and from every pore the death-sweat of decay.
But most boys were lost boys
lost forever in that no-man’s land
that Neverland of lives unlived.
© M.L.Emmett
Nov 10, 2015
Nov 10, 2015 at 12:32 PM UTC
The Bells of Notre Dame called out “Come fill my Center Hall”
“Come Catholic, Muslim, Hindu and Jew; Come with no faith at all”
The Mothers of the Murdered came, united in their grief.
For bullets and I.E.D’s cannot sort us by belief.
One woman in a hijab had come here from Verdun.
Like the Protestant beside her, She had lost her only son.
Both were strangers to this place, Unfamiliar with the prayers
But, having no place else to go; They found some comfort there.
The Highborn and the famous came with those of low estate
Some came here to find peace of Soul; to put an end to hate.
Some sought shelter from the world; to find sanctuary.
But the figure on the Cross proclaims we all face Calvary.
We all face the same sentence; all perish in the end.
We know this evil must be stopped but know not how or when.
The Bells of Notre Dame call out
“Let us begin again.”
Nov 18, 2015
Nov 18, 2015 at 10:02 PM UTC
There we stood, resplendent, in our articles of war
daring for a moment to forget the matters core--
that death and dying looming, like mountains in the night,
would be the grim reward for those who'd dared to fight.
The British expedition, in that humid august air,
would hoist the recognition of mankind's new despair;
the wave of Schlieffen's reckoning had broken us that day
and the yeoman of Agincourt had come and gone away.
We fought and bled and fought and died a day or two at Mons,
but soon retreat was sounded, a melody to pawns.
French soil stained in English blood and washed in English tears
then tilled by German cannons for four more ********* years
was less the blessing we first conceived, that bitter, deafening fall,
so late in 1914, when the Great War came to call.
The salient crumbled, frailly; a grave portent it seemed,
soon would come the Somme, Verdun, and horrors never dreamed.
Mar 21, 2010
Mar 21, 2010 at 8:40 PM UTC
Il se dressait dans la verdure,
Telle une hampe pour les cieux.
C'était un séquoia géant
Venu des prairies d’Amérique
Et des forêts Algonquines.
Il avait voyagé en cale,
Soigné comme un voyageur,
Argenté, durant toute la traversée.
Il fut planté mais aussi fêté
En l’an mille huit cent quatre-vingt
Dans le parc du futur Casino,
Puis soigné par des jardiniers
Amoureux de leur métier.
En ces années s’affermissait enfin
La République, certes bien trop conservatrice,
Elle l’est d’ailleurs bien restée.
C’était quand même la République
Même à Luchon qui étincelait encore
Des feux et des ors de la fête impériale
Qui lui avait amenés
Tant de touristes au gousset rembourré
Et quand s’affermissait cette République
En cette «belle époque» des fortunés
Et d'exploitation éhontée
De tant d’autres laissés bien seuls
Par la naissance et sans instruction.
Mes aïeux Pyrénéens
Le virent planter et même pousser
Car en ces temps, encore,
Les sages et les doux prenaient plaisir
À observer et contempler
Les belles Dames en leur vêture
Et les arbres pousser peu à peu,
Jusqu’un jour à feindre de dépasser
La cime des ardoises Pyrénéennes.
Ce fut un Séquoia somptueux
Dès qu’il atteint ses vingt ans
En cette année dix-neuf cent
Alors que la compagnie du Midi
Faisait construire, non **** de lui
Le bel hôtel palace qui fut fini
En 1916, j’en ais la gorge serrée
Car la bas, tant de maçons
Ne le virent jamais construit
Et n’eurent pas le bonheur
D’admirer le grand Séquoia pousser
Car leur jeunesse fut ravie
Là-bas en Argonne ou à Verdun
Où tant de jeunes hommes mourraient
Dans les tranchées de leur dernier souffle.
Paul Arrighi
Jun 2, 2016
Jun 2, 2016 at 1:16 PM UTC
In Neverland - never to grow old
never to marry that sweetheart
never to have children and grandchildren
nor watch hair thin and grey.
Full of derring-do - more dash than discipline
lanky and loose-limbed they swank and saunter
not like soldiers at all
no doff the cap humility
to the old rules and distant monarchies.
From a newly stolen world
hardly secured or steady with itself
lodged on the edge of a vast continent
clinging to a rim of turquoise blue.
Now cramped
in the pock-holed sores of ancient lands
richly bone-dusted from time to time.
Waiting for the fight to end
to go ‘back home’ ‘over there’
to farms and factories; schools and stations.
Still there - left behind
in the archipelago of cemeteries
as far as Fromelles, Pozieres,
to Bullencourt and Paschendaele
in fields of beetroot and corn,
fields bleeding red with poppies
beside the Menin Road at Ypres
in bluebelled woods of Verdun
in the silt of the Somme
on the plains of Flanders
in the victory graves at Amiens
Monash’s boys - the lost boys
cried for their mothers
begged for water
screamed to die
hung like khaki bundles on the wire.
Commanded by Field Marshalls
who never went to the fields,
who played the numbers game
in a war of bluff and bluster,
who never touched the dirt and slime,
nor waded through the ****** slush
of broken men and boys,
never waist-deep in mud and sinking,
wounded and drowning in that shambles of a war
Wearing dead men’s boots
and shrapnel-holed helmets
tunics and leggings splattered and rotting
with dead men’s blood and brains
Some haunted boys came home
knapsacks full of secret pictures,
old rusty tins crammed with suffering
breast pockets held their grief
wrapped in shroud-shreds.
They brought their duckboard demons
to the world of peace
Gas-choked fretful lungs still brought
the caustic fumes with every breath exhaled
and from every pore the death-sweat of decay.
But most boys were lost boys
lost forever in that no-man’s land
that Neverland of lives unlived.
© M.L.Emmett
Apr 25, 2016
Apr 25, 2016 at 5:44 AM UTC
He barely remembers Verdun and then when that was done
it was Passchendale
but now old and frail on a walking frame
with a gammy leg full of cold shrapnel
from the hell
of the bravery
in the war to end all slavery.
He moves slowly along the top of the cliff
leg quite stiff in the stiffening breeze.
And the falling stars
those medals with bars upon his lapel
another reminder
from the long ago hell.
He hears the pipers
fears the snipers but they've all gone
somewhere on the Somme.
Lulled into some false sense of serenity
I took my eyes off him and didn't see
him go over the top
Pulled away
and then he rose and went marching off across the morning bay
to meet his friends
(from a friends battalion,somewhere up Wigan way)
I watched them as they knelt to pray
and then go off into yesterday
to fight a war
and win their
peace.
May 5, 2013
May 5, 2013 at 3:40 AM UTC
Lend me your arm
To replace my leg
The rats ate it for me
At Verdun
At Verdun
I ate a lot of rats
But they didn't give me back my leg
And that's why I was given the Croix de Guerre
And a wooden leg
And a wooden leg
Oct 3, 2014
Oct 3, 2014 at 4:32 PM UTC
In the dark, past no man’s land,
When the cold night’s wind whispered low,
We heard a most incongruous sound;
christmas carols sung by our foe.
Someone raised a flag of truce
and we met them on contested ground.
We shared our food, some cigarettes.
And hummed along with their joyful sound.
Our fellows sang what tunes we knew-
In broken English they replied.
Together we buried our common dead
Who belonged now not to either side.
I hear in some sectors games were played.
a game of football of a sort.
Sadly it was the briefest pause
ere we resumed our deadly sport.
In years that followed no quarter was given
So bitter had our men become.
There were no songs left in our hearts.
after the slaughter of Verdun.
Dec 23, 2017
Dec 23, 2017 at 11:32 PM UTC
I look upon the Fields of France
and see her scars a century old.
The fading craters made by shells;
the trench lines where they fought and died.
No star shells now disturb the night
No need to fumble for gas masks.
No "No -man's Land" between the wires.
No butchery mars these fields of France.
In Nineteen Fourteen, in July
with declarations by old men,
A generation went to war
and most would not see home again.
In muddy trenches rats grew fat.
Whistles sounded the hopeless charge.
Machine guns made a mince of men.
At Verdun, alone, a million dead.
This is now and that was then,
but this is, in truth, a fragile peace.
Hatred simmers, oaths are sworn,
I sense the battle lines are drawn.
The lamp lights flicker now as then.
Will butchery mar these fields again?
Jul 29, 2014
Jul 29, 2014 at 7:33 AM UTC
the graveyards of Verdun
are full
with summer flowers
children are playing
hide and seek
among the crosses
their parents
coke in hand
keep looking for the names
of their grand fathers
on the wooden beams
verifying the family album
swallows dive steeply
under darkening clouds
slowly approaching from the west
you try your best
to give them shapes
and faces
them
who in grey noisy nights
fell out of life
bright red leaves
flushed prematurely
by sudden frost
* * *
Mar 17, 2015
Mar 17, 2015 at 12:53 PM UTC
We saved Satan’s jewelry in the ossuary
Skulls adorning the walls
Bones piled together without a cross or star
Their shadows braided by death
No longer living in mud stained fear
The end when a poets life begins,
where a hand reaching for God
is consumed by rhymes lost in time
is only remembered by those who march willingly;
to be scorned by those who would try again
to control the destiny of those who love their children
There is no applause in the gathering place
No conversation or last rites
Their once covered their faces of shock and
their glazed eyes that once pierced every conscience
stripped by time to feed the living
No one knows their names
or who ordered them to their death
But he shot those who would run
They lay in wait for someone to say,
“That is my friend”
But nobody came
Only their mothers know they never came home
And they wait hoping someone wiped their brow
Aug 20, 2017
Aug 20, 2017 at 12:05 AM UTC
My mind wanders to the stillness of a field
where wild asters used to stud the grass with blue
I seem to hear the echo of a voice
Lamenting over the vast stretches where my thoughts cling
Here, children ran and played and called each other yesterday
and people sometimes lazed in the earth's firmness
Riffling the crisp grass through their fingers
or gaze into the blue greyness of the vast unknown
Once this field nurtured life
Once a squirrel hid in it's thickness,
an ant crawled busily as it clung to a tree
Once all was teeming with life
Like a mother who nurtures a babe inside her womb
not a living creature now on that field
None whose love, whose life, whose breath
once braced the hearts of those he knew
What is that echo I seem to hear
where recently the field turned battlefield
Of maimed and wounded
I seem to hear the repeated blows against my chest
Or, do I hear the outside pounding of a heart
now the stench of death spreads an eerie feeling over me
I walk bent, my ear tuned to someone's distress
I cannot feel uplifted
It matters not where the source of death is life
clocking it's rhythmic beat
On its march to that irrevocable end
but when the arrogant hand of the battle
In Vietnam, Valley Forge, Verdun, Gettysburg or Golan Heights
moves the pace faster
Who am I not to feel the pain
the deep sore pain I share with those mourning
Mourning their beloved dead
striped of a life once dear to their very own essence
And dear to those who knew and loved and cared
who now have gnawing at their vitals the agony of loss
Like an amputation of the very fibers of their being
I share the deep sore pain of those left mourning
I think of their moment of anguish, their eons of hurt
Yet hope springs among some
And sometimes cheer a moment of cheer
like a grace note against a solemn chord
I picture myself on that field among the dying
I go deep into their entrails
Among those struggling to grip that last grip
that last gasp
Until beaten by death they surrender
Yet at times, I'm among those
who go to death with grace
As though the secret of the unknown were revealed in beauty
I ask myself, " Which would I " ?
I cannot know the imponderable
And yet I know a choice I'll be called to make
I'm back with those left living again
Living and mourning
I ***** perhaps to soothe with words or comfort with my touch
But I feel empty, hollowed out am endless desert
Like those who once knew those dead
Mar 22, 2017
Mar 22, 2017 at 12:40 PM UTC