Caked, tugged at, sucked back, slowgoing, wading
Lost Tommies shelldefeaned leadpregnant
Advancing slowly whilst grenaded
Man insane to go against machines
Without officer’s baton and ironed strides.
Imagining ranks of young Frenchmen
Artists and teachers, future lynchpins
Of society and pillars, perhaps, some
Sons prodigal, the rum-dumbed
But none death deserving
None so numb to love our Lord above stopped strumming his lyre
Silent music easing eager hearing hearts, courting generous ear
Bright blue uniforms like a storm of blazing heavenlight
Carving a cousin sun into the night
Lighting up like ten million Christmas trees, unto France’s bleeding.
Grievers carving friezes, lest forgetting
Names and ages of those dead
Not in pages but writ cold stone eternal
Whole world verdant, allpasture churned by anarch’s turmoil
To a roiled, ruined, rapture appleless curdled
To a poison garden.
Shell-dug fissures, oil-surreal murrains
Troopers screaming, dying ancient bog deaths
Soil-caked hands rise from a sucking pool
Attempting to climb air, unmoving
Damp, jewel-draped hands in Arthur’s grasp place Excalibur
Scabbardless, outsinging, for Arthur not Launcelot
Water droplets bead its neck, steel swan unwanton
Like dew on ruff petals
Like envy inducing diamonds gleaming
Eyes sightless banding a diadem
Querent’s symbol neck of drowned swan forged rigid anew.
Mad Atlantean phantom hatching from a lake silvered to a Diana mirror
As at Nemi, once vast pleasure barges resided in sordid excessive plenty
Wherein ancestors and chosen champions cavorted in forbidden dalliance
Lamplight romps, animal-masked
Assuring of progeny visages hideous to vision
Lead to no man’s land’s dead centre by death.
Alchemisland 
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