William Heath: ‘A Trip to Flanders’ and ‘Remembering the Great War’

A Trip to Flanders

In Flanders the poppies bloom
blood-red, the cornflowers blue,
fields of wheat and barley
cover the hills where farmers
in season harvest their crops,
and milk cows graze on grass.

True, sometimes a plow exposes
bones of long-lost soldiers, a buried
dud explodes, on rainy days the smell
of rusty iron is strong, and we can see
remnants of zigzagging trench lines,
scattered ponds of old bomb craters.

Near a brick bunker by a canal
where doctor-poet John McCrae
did his life-or-death work,
identical white stone crosses
in neat rows honor the fallen
by name and date—when they can.

One is dedicated to a boy who
lied about his age, lived to fifteen,
but most repeat the same words:
A Soldier in the Great War.
The body, like thousands of
other war dead, has no name.

In the walled old weaving town
of Ypres, we walk beneath
a large marble arch carved
with the names of some
fifty-five-thousand British troops
whose bodies are never found.

Names without bodies,
bodies without names,
this is what it meant to be
a soldier in the Great War.

William Heath

Remembering the Great War

After the shell is planted
among us everything is roses
and poppies, I hope to never
again see such a blooming.

Skulls mushroom from muck,
rats’ eyes take our measure,
bees flash by with a leaden buzz,
lice are our only lovers.

A gassed asthmatic, I keep
on the wall a fading map webbed
with lines, I run my fingers along
where friends were last seen.

William Heath