In Flanders Fields rhetoric rots to bone,

and the parochial dream of flags and kings

consumes the young like Saturn devouring his sons,

and here, in the particulate mud,

a generation liquefies:

not heroes but bewildered boys whose

mothers’ letters arrive at trenches late,

emptied of address and strewn with dirt,

while back home the vile machinery of patriotism

grinds its citizens to purpose,

to the lie of honour stitched in mass grave shrouds.

 

Yet from this rupture in godly belief,

this unspeakable dismantling of the

promised ones with shell-shock and gangrene,

conviction fractures language open:

Eliot’s “Wasteland” blooming from corpse-fields,

Owen’s “Pity of war” distilled from gas-choked lungs,

Sassoon’s bitter liturgies of war that

refuse neat consolations.

 

So stand we now at the edge of this abyss not to

celebrate but to remember how poetry learned to

speak with shattered mouth, blood-filled,

how dignity was salvaged not from death alone

but from the unflinching witness of the dying,

how in the rotting mud of senselessness

new thinking grew in strange patterns thrown

out with passion against the old world,

like poppies torn from their Latin name (Papaver rhoeas),

wild and terrible and true,

offering not redemption but the cold grace of

seeing clearly what we are

and what we shall be.

 

12/11/2025