The darkness crumbles away <br />It is the same old druid Time as ever, <br />Only a live thing leaps my hand, <br />A queer sardonic rat, <br />As I pull the parapet's poppy <br />To stick behind my ear. <br />Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew <br />Your cosmopolitan sympathies, <br />Now you have touched this English hand <br />You will do the same to a German <br />Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure <br />To cross the sleeping green between. <br />It seems you inwardly grin as you pass <br />Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes, <br />Less chanced than you for life, <br />Bonds to the whims of murder, <br />Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, <br />The torn fields of France. <br />What do you see in our eyes <br />At the shrieking iron and flame <br />Hurled through still heavens? <br />What quaver -what heart aghast? <br />Poppies whose roots are in men's veins <br />Drop, and are ever dropping; <br />But mine in my ear is safe, <br />Just a little white with the dust.<br /><br />Isaac Rosenberg<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/break-of-day-in-the-trenches/
