Crying out through the years, <br />The echoes of the dead seem to resound <br />As we trudge through that muddy, wintry ground. <br />Cold, rain -sodden, hungry, silent, <br />Each shrouded in our personal response, <br />Unwilling to acknowledge each other. <br /> <br />Water-swamped, flat, grey, miserable land <br />Traversed by cemeteries and ploughed black fields. <br />The sparse woods still cratered. <br />Unseen to the eye, bits of guns and war waste lie <br />Beneath the grass, feeding the saplings. <br />Under our feet, everywhere lie trenches <br />Criss-crossing-a monstrous labyrinth of death <br />Still active as fields throw up their litter <br />To kill some hapless ploughman <br />Year after year, eighty years on. <br />Or a road caves in to reveal <br />Three German officers round a table, <br />Or an allied officer's bones <br />But his pipe and whisky bottle intact. <br /> <br />Mutely, we pay our humble homage to the dead, <br />Numbed, not just by frozen rain, but by unshed tears, <br />Pity for a generation we never knew <br />But whose graves shriek out at us <br />'We lived; we were young; <br />We thought we mattered; <br />But see how we died.' <br />And we are filled with an indescribable despair <br />That binds us in a silent chain of grief.<br /><br />Margery Rehman<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/pilgrimage-to-flanders-field-10th-november-1998/
