The Battle Of The Somme by Dennis Allen Lange

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Another war and time, another place
About the foe he had begun to face,
Grant said, “I’ll fight it out upon this line
If it all summer takes till it is mine.”

And following the stubbornness of mules,
The Great War foes fought on like fools
Upon a line along the River Somme
Without the flair of war, without aplomb.
As if a duel with twenty paces stepped,
They stayed while many new-made widows wept
For five long months while each side’s pain
Grew even larger without any gain.
They slogged it out upon that bloody sod
Without a thought to man or even God,
With Germany and all its Axis band
Fixed on the solitary goal of land.
A solemn summer turned to somber fall
And Somme became a soggy grave, a gall
A million drank. And sobbing? – even more,
As Somme showed the futility of war.

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© Dennis Allen Lange and thebardonthehill.wordpress.com, 2018.

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The Crimson Poppies by Dennis Lange

The Crimson Poppies

In Flanders Field (all battlefields),
  The crimson poppies spread
As young men taken to a war
  Gave up their blood and bled. 

For one man’s lust for power fed
   Their bodies to a war.
Another’s land lust also led
   The young to bleed still more. 

Like rivers, from their flesh it flowed,
   Their lives not marked by sand
That slipped out of their hourglass –
   But blood upon the land. 

In Flanders Field, the blood has dried;
   The veins are cold, no flow.
And in the place of dreams and lives,
   The crimson poppies grow.

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photo by Dan Shirley at
http://www.rgbstock.com/photo/oeAO1C0/Poppies

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© Dennis Lange and thebardonthehill.wordpress.com, 2014.

 

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