"wilfred" poems
"...FRESHER FIELDS THAN FLANDERS..."
Christ! Even the Son
of God can get it wrong!
Time his Second Coming
to end up in WW1.
To us he looked like one of the 'Un!
To the 'Un he was one of us.
Both sides let him
have it.
Him who had come
to die for us
and by God
He did.
Hung on the barbed wire
for days on end
we all thinking will it
never end.
Crying for His Father
getting on our ****** nerves.
Some say they saw him
at the Somme
some say at Crucifix Corner
"...forgive them for they know not..."
it went on and on
'...what they've done."
But I had by gum!
I pitied the poor ******
Crawled out under
****** fire.
Put my last ciggie
between his lips
made of nothing but
tea leaves....liquorice...treacle.
"Thanks mate.!" he gasped
with his last breath
turning into young Tommy
Smith at His Death.
A right good lad I knew
from Hudersfield.
Shell shocked
they said I was.
I wasn't.
All men are the Son
of God as it happens.
Even a dead 'Un is one.
The Son of God is forever
getting it wrong.
Christ! Will He ever
learn.
Timing His next Coming
to land up in WW11.
Other Wars
waiting in the wings
for Him
to come again.
Wish He would just
give up on us.
He's of no ****** use
whatsoever.
Death is a better
friend.
Survival as I know
is Hell.
***
***
"...FRESHER FIELDS THAN FLANDERS..." is the last line of a Preface that Wilfred Owen intended for his book.
Was first going to write a sci-fi thing with the Saviour coming down at just the wrong time. But as I wrote I remembered an old man I used to look after who would tell me about his WW11 experiences and of his grand dad's tales from WW1 so that it ended up as a mixture of the real and the unreal in the surreal situation of war and all it entails.
Nov 10, 2018
Nov 10, 2018 at 4:13 PM UTC
…These men are worth your tears:
You are not worth their merriment.
-Wilfred Owen, “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo”
When that loudmouth on the wireless machine
Alludes to Western Civilization
What does he mean? Paradise Lost? Probably not
Nor Saint Paul speaking on the Field of Mars
The Kalevala, Hagia Sophia
With its pendentives lifting up our prayers
Horatius fighting to defend his bridge
And Wilfred Owen dying bravely on his
Lord Tennyson and Idylls of the King
Chapultepec, Henry V, Becket
The paratroops at Arnhem, Saint Thomas More,
His King’s loyal servant, but God’s first
The Stray Dog poets of Saint Petersburg
The brave last stand of Roland at Roncesvalles
Lewis and Tolkien and glasses of beer
Montcalm and Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham
Hildegard von Bingen, Siegfried and the Rhine
Magna Carta, HMS Hood, the Thames
The Grove of Daphne, “The Old Rugged Cross”
Beatrix Potter and her little pet rabbit
El Cid, Anne Frank, John Keats, Saint Benedict
“I Have a Dream,” Dostoyevsky, and Greene
Viktor Frankl, Dag Hammarkskjold, and Proust
Good Chaucer’s naughty pilgrims telling tales
The Gettysburg Address, Willie and Joe
Stern Saint Augustine of North Africa
Wodehouse writing a jolly bit of fun
Saint Corbinian and Bavaria
The ancient glories of Byzantium
Pius XII contra the bombs and lies
The 602nd TD Battalion
Saint Joan, the Prado, and Robert Frost
And far, far more.
When that loudmouth on the wireless machine
Alludes to Western Civilization
What does he mean?
Nov 4, 2018
Nov 4, 2018 at 4:06 PM UTC
Here, and over here -
The fortunate sons
Those who made it home
To fields and hills of native tongue
In the soil their people toiled
- They listen quietly when we come
There, and over there -
Beneath crossed lines too many
Still - they man the trenches
Along the Marne and Somme
Below the woods of Belleau
And the forest of Argonne
No sonnets in a foreign language
Rendered where they languish -
The distant rest far and away
In a cold November grave
We should remember
Here and there
The old lie -
And the young.
r ~ 11/11/14
Nov 11, 2014
Nov 11, 2014 at 12:34 AM UTC
Poulton Library and
Adele & I are here to
share with whoever
arrives some thoughts
concerning War and
Literature. Linda sets
us up with chairs and
table, and first here is
delightful surprise: Pat
who I taught thirty years
ago - there will be no
need for me to dig a
trench and put on a
jacket bullet-proof
with tin hat on my
head - Philip Larkin
Alun Lewis, Sassoon
and Wilfred Owen
give staunch support
to Jon Stallworthy's
World War One tome
Anthem for Doomed
Youth: Twelve Poets
but doomed not us
this century later.
(c) C J Heyworth June 2014
Jun 17, 2014
Jun 17, 2014 at 12:25 PM UTC
The Bells ring out great Peals of joy.
The war is won, Great Albion.
It merely cost a million dead,
a generation lost and done.
To you, fate tendered victory sweet,
to the Germans, a bitter peace.
There, fatherless boys, abed, asleep,
plot revenge for their deceased.
In the Wilfred Owen house;
no alloyed joy to meld with sorrow:
That day they learned their son had died
They’ll dress the house in Black tomorrow.
His mother knew before word came,
she had a sense her son was gone.
That he’d be among the last to fall
for the glory of Great Albion
He fought almost unto the end,
dying in the war’s last week.
When Mortal flesh and bullets meet
Poets are silenced when machine guns speak..
There is a pathos in his fate,
dying in the last week of war
Like the man who sailed the Ocean deep,
only to drown in sight of shore.
Mar 11, 2012
Mar 11, 2012 at 9:40 AM UTC
"The pity of war, the pity war distills". - Wilfred Owen"
Just as a feral war begs for armistice,
a season of peace engenders
a violence vacuum that begs to be filled
as surely as a hollow begs for a pond.
It seems a cosmic battle rages
between the oversouls of people
who would chisel a sculpture to grace
and those who would hack off its arms.
History’s fools fire up their bully horns
shouting proud oratory to ignorance -
and lemmings goose-step to the precipice -
doomed to plunge into a sea of misery.
Then there is quiet - guilty and reflective.
How could we let this happen
with so much gain and loss in the balance?
and the sculptors of civilization
find fresh marble to once again
carve reason, beauty, purpose
from the acrid ashes of pride.
But the oversoul of hate will brood and re-fester
as long as it's thought noble to **** for a cause.
© 2016 by Robert Charles Howard
Apr 1, 2016
Apr 1, 2016 at 8:50 AM UTC
"The pity of war, the pity war distilled" - Wilfred Owen
Somewhere in the after-haze,
Jesus sought Mohammed
who was on his way to see him.
Moses met them on the ridge
and without a mike or gavel,
the meeting was convened.
They fell to their knees in sorrow
hands cupped to catch their tears -
shed for the smoldering chaos below -
so far from what was meant to be:
Sworded and chain-mailed crusaders,
suicide synagogue bombers,
machine guns stuttering in Palestine,
fire raining from the skies
bombs igniting at the speed of death,
slaughter at a Parisian concert.
Fathers of the light rise up
from your lofty provenance.
Unite your tear-drenched hands
and come dwell within us.
Breathe healing truth into the ears
of every foe of love and life.
So much more was meant to be!
Come to us now
before the setting of the sun!
November, 2015
Nov 11, 2015
Nov 11, 2015 at 10:54 AM UTC
From Wilfred Owen to his Mother, France 1918
Fastened frosted muds battle with my being but will these tears mean anything if my resolution has come too late?
Will England’s Green shores ever sigh for me; for those slain here?
The smell of the dew is still sweet on my senseless tongue.
Nothing in this septic land could shave the zest from my skin.
When the gasp of my final breath resounds in silence,
I only hope that I sleep and slip away from the impossibility of understanding what has occurred here.
To fade into my torment and leave the things I love.
Can this be my only contentment when
The canvas I envisioned was so white, the page so blank, so vast?
I only ever pleaded for a chance to fill even the tiniest part.
I want for now only to be gone from here, Dear Mother…..
God, these tears burn my cheeks in this cold,
As if I have been moved into the sun, and I feel I am helpless.
If only my life were the sonnet form of this uncertainty,
My existence I could abolish with the half-rhyme of my Knowledge.
For it is law that a sonnet of fifteen lines is no longer a sonnet.
Its very existence has been prolonged beyond definition.
A life form sonnet of thirteen lines has been cut too short,
Gunned down by fate before the indulgence of its own conclusion. France is now a pathetic source of melodramatic monologue.
Trapped without the hidden ear of soliloquy,
Within this surreal Garden of Courtly Love, I am alone.
I can no longer feel the brush of your angel wings as they breeze Through No Mans Land,
Or anywhere on this lonely world-wide shore.
For they have been grabbed to the ground with an unassuming thud by the gravitational pull of bile and death.
And so it comes to this.
To never again hold a thing of beauty in my hand;
To press it gently against my anxious heart.
Is this what I’ve become?
Or to fight on and never speak a word of what has occurred here,
For Dante fell too short in revelation and I am no one to amend.
I have no place here or there and,
In limbo, I will probably die here Mother.
Here with nothing but the burning of my fragile heart to remind me. Earth’s sleep has broken.
Irrevocable, irreplaceable, irresponsible.
But nothing happens.
Barry Miller September 2007: Los Angeles, CA.
Apr 7, 2012
Apr 7, 2012 at 1:31 PM UTC
Following the bloodstains home,
we tread the land with bristled soles,
to cleanse the souls of the wide-eyed youth,
spectacular fireworks to alter the truth,
tar the land, and pepper the streets,
concrete the corner where strangers meet,
the placebo joy of the modern life,
left vacant in the money-man's wake,
a cardboard lot left to decay,
oh, this is my Britain of today.
The newsrooms are clinical,
policies in place to reduce moral outrage,
to reduce it to a hysterical mess,
a cartoon-disaster of life's distress,
so the public in fear, exist but not live,
to fight the recession; you must give, give, give,
give, your life to your freedom
to live without choice,
you can sign a slip,
to mimic a voice
and to ensure the vow of regular pay,
oh, this is my Britain of today.
A history of salvation,
we lend heroes to established truth,
we parade on corners in our concrete joy,
rejoice in the miracle of the new royal boy,
who shall live in fat, and live in health,
sacred tender to the country's wealth,
of empire and power of totalities,
of stone-walled cities,
and Northern breeze,
the Jack tattooed on imperial flags,
oh, this is my Britain of today.
A stream of entertainment,
how it pounds the floor in seamless sound,
how it drizzles the walls in a trophy glitz,
a hypnotic and false, synthetic blitz,
of caffeine veins, and digital sea,
of attention-span in atrophy.
Wait not on thoughts, instead mind-chatter,
you say “don't talk on dark topic,
and keep depth away!”
oh, this is my Britain of today.
Following the apathy home,
I tread the land in heavy-worn soles,
to cleanse my soul of restricted air,
to dream of travel, to fortunes fair,
but in this bliss of a greener grass;
it is for Britain I hold communal mass.
For each Blair, I know, is a Rupert Brooke,
each levelled city, there's Wilfred's book,
or some Dickensian dream of caricatured past,
where only tyranny is built to last,
for each liberty taken, is Huxley's piece,
is Lessing's thoughts and Shelley's release,
and the meander of Avon through grey rain,
adds desperate poetry for the lives still slain,
so we can live in peace, and in sugared tea,
with red wine lips on the periphery;
in those day's hard living,
in those days' worth spent,
with only a book
and blood descent,
the community dances in the advent of May,
oh, this is my Britain of yesterday.
Jan 25, 2014
Jan 25, 2014 at 12:44 PM UTC
After the blast of lightning from the east
A dismal fog hoarse siren howled at dawn
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Whispering in my hearth
Sojourning through a southern realm
Halted against the shade of a lost hill
Charged with beauty as a cloud
With bright darkling glows.
(A Poem made up of lines from various Wilfred Own
poems, mostly just first lines and published just
a day or two before Britain declared war on Germany
on 4 August 1914 in tribute to Wilfred Owen,
one of the greatest First World War Poets)
Aug 3, 2014
Aug 3, 2014 at 5:14 PM UTC
I cannot settle in Blighty.
Wounded or not I have changed.
My feelings are with my comrades,
platonic, a complex of simplicities.
We talk only together for no others understand
beyond the old lies and the gas attack of poetry.
My being is incomplete.
I lack the wounds
to disregard life
beyond my skin.
Dec 19, 2015
Dec 19, 2015 at 2:00 PM UTC
There before me stands the cenotaph
of Master Sergent Wilfred Niles
He died of his wounds received
in the battle of Belleau .
He is buried in the soil
near the River Marne , in France
He left behind his mother Maggie
Her only child gone , she's now so bereft
She would die in a few short months
Of a broken heart from grief
Oct 9, 2014
Oct 9, 2014 at 8:52 PM UTC
again, i reach the upper room.
floor teetered, me the cabinet maker,
offfered another case, one of mine choice.
she had lovely hair, said the space was moving.
so it was, betwixt a little crowding there,
wilfred owen, his letters and wooden steps,
to reach further up.
below they serve liver and onions, which
i am told is very tasty,
sbm.
Aug 4, 2015
Aug 4, 2015 at 2:06 AM UTC
Amnesty. the 11th hour, the 11th day, the 11th month, the year 1918
A knock upon a large closed door.
A lady awaiting news on her son.
Seven days pre before was the time he was no more.
Flags and banners waving fiercely,
Horns and whistles, shouts and cheers.
A welcome end to the bloodiest war,
Celebrations for peace, we’d won.
But for this fine lady, of a fine young son,
On this fine day for some.
She had waited, then through post discovered,
her son was lost to war,
Just seven days pre end before.
A man of the field he had been,
Reporting in words all he’d seen,
Gruesome accounts of the highest scale,
Not no tale,
But truth and sincere his word his actions, his doing.
All in order to settle a score and record what happened through four long years in war before.
My pen my gun, my ink my bullets,
I fire onto canvass to create an image,
Of four long years of the gruesome war
and all the gruesome scenes within it.
And upon reflection on your completion,
Please remember our finest sons.
Of which Wilfred Owen was one
and as a wartime poet was penning,
as he was fighting in it.
Robert Kingston 17.10.14
Oct 29, 2015
Oct 29, 2015 at 1:28 PM UTC
Who may not talk must fight,
engage the diplomacy of guns,
though having supped the devils' ***
we look on our works and despair.
Ideas have become principles
and our givens must be taken.
Vile words replace understanding
or mitigate our unfound trust.
Perhaps one should contemplate
or denounce our loss of grace
displacing belicose thoughts.
Dec 9, 2015
Dec 9, 2015 at 2:13 PM UTC
At Wilfred Owen’s Grave
by Michael R. Burch
A week before the Armistice, you died.
They did not keep your heart like Livingstone’s,
then plant your bones near Shakespeare’s. So you lie
between two privates, sacrificed like Christ
to politics, your poetry unknown
except for that brief flurry’s: thirteen months
with Gaukroger beside you in the trench,
dismembered, as you babbled, as the stench
of gangrene filled your nostrils, till you clenched
your broken heart together and the fist
began to pulse with life, so close to death.
Or was it at Craiglockhart, in the care
of “ergotherapists” that you sensed life
is only in the work, and made despair
a thing that Yeats despised, but also breath,
a mouthful’s merest air, inspired less
than wrested from you, and which we confess
we only vaguely breathe: the troubled air
that even Sassoon failed to share, because
a man in pieces is not healed by gauze,
and breath’s transparent, unless we believe
the words are true despite their lack of weight
and float to us like chlorine—scalding eyes,
and lungs, and hearts. Your words revealed the fate
of boys who retched up life here, gagged on lies.
Published by The Chariton Review, The Neovictorian/Cochlea, Rogue Scholars, Romantics Quarterly, Mindful of Poetry, Famous Poets and Poems, Poetry Life & Times, Other Voices International
Keywords/Tags: Wilfred, Owen, war, poem, trench, warfare, chlorine, gas, gangrene, armistice, ergotherapists, Craiglockhart, Sassoon, Yeats, honor, lies, gag, gagged, gagging, death, grave, funeral, elegy, eulogy, tribute, World War I
Mar 19, 2020
Mar 19, 2020 at 3:42 AM UTC
I want a her in my life
Like all those people
Who talk about her
The goddess they met
Or the date they're going on
And I know that I'll never be a wilfred owen
Or an ee Cummings
Or a sipho sepamla
But when I write about a her I feel closer to being a master than ever before
Jun 17, 2015
Jun 17, 2015 at 4:26 PM UTC
He's marching out of step, our poet.
You can see it in their eyes and hear
it in their sighs. They whisper 'snob'.
But he's always gone beyond the norm,
hiding thoughts, hiding loves, faith denied.
Duty to art, duty to country,
duty to comrades bind and confound.
Few try to understand poetic
powers. Few seek the truth inside the man.
He set out to face the slaughter, knowing
death's colours, sounds and smells, writing of waste.
His end a poet's wreath matted red. His last
trench a French canal. His pen impatient
Jan 30, 2016
Jan 30, 2016 at 9:39 AM UTC
ancient place, much posting, signs
for care, letters of fortitude and sadness.
face to the wall.
chair to the wall, sit slightly unbalanced
read, the language, sentences there.
this one wrote it. wilfred owen.
oswestry heritage.
sbm.
Nov 8, 2014
Nov 8, 2014 at 1:38 AM UTC
Bovine-like, we shall meet our deaths
(Such is the scythe the reaper wields)
No matter that the final breaths
Come in stockyards or placid fields.
A slight rustle, perhaps, we’ll feel
At the loss of our distant kin;
Another gear, another wheel.
Oh well—that’s life—come on, tuck in.
What, then, shall be the epitaph?
No bromide written in some stone,
One would hope, for this life once shone
In a mother’s eyes, father’s laugh
Which still flower in memories
And vexes all our reveries.
Apr 4, 2017
Apr 4, 2017 at 9:31 AM UTC
John Keats
Didn’t write any Tweets
Nor ever undertook
To post on Facebook
Percy B. Shelley
Sailed the Don Juan to sea
Where a monstrous storm seen rarely
Robbed Frankenstein’s Mary
His friend, Lord Byron,
Watched the beach with his pyre on
And then, on a whim,
He went for a swim
William Shakespeare
Loved his wife so sincere
That he willed her when dead
His second best bed
Sir Wilfred Owen
Wrote a **** spiffing poem
And he might well have wrote more
Had he outlived the war
Robert Frost
Got hopelessly lost
When for giggles and a laugh
He took the wrong path
Emily Dickinson
Needed hope to cling on,
So for lack of lucky heather
She clutched an old feather
William Blake
Saw the tiger, too late,
And he felt a cold shiver
As it ate his liver
Jul 13, 2019
Jul 13, 2019 at 7:50 PM UTC
“The pity of war. The pity war distilled” - Wilfred Owen
When the rising sun breaks
The curves and slants
Of the Rockies’ eastern horizon,
Gold and crimson rays cloak the
Western fields and mountains
With a rich florescent mantle.
Morning doves greet the emergent light
With sweet and cheerful calls,
Of greetings to the nascent day.
A small gathering of does and fawns
Pause to graze beneath the luminescent sky.
Harmony, balance and peace
Seem to rule the universe.
But, sadly we know better my friends.
Distant cousins who would
Otherwise pass a pleasant meal
Gun each other down
Like effigies in a sick carnival game.
How can we dare to hope?
How can we ever heal?
How can we muster courage enough
To sacrifice our homicidal pride
On the altar of love and justice?”
Apr 17, 2022
Apr 17, 2022 at 2:49 PM UTC