My soul looked down from a vague height with Death, <br />As unremembering how I rose or why, <br />And saw a sad land, weak with sweats of dearth, <br />Gray, cratered like the moon with hollow woe, <br />And fitted with great pocks and scabs of plaques. <br /> <br />Across its beard, that horror of harsh wire, <br />There moved thin caterpillars, slowly uncoiled. <br />It seemed they pushed themselves to be as plugs <br />Of ditches, where they writhed and shrivelled, killed. <br /> <br />By them had slimy paths been trailed and scraped <br />Round myriad warts that might be little hills. <br /> <br />From gloom's last dregs these long-strung creatures crept, <br />And vanished out of dawn down hidden holes. <br /> <br />(And smell came up from those foul openings <br />As out of mouths, or deep wounds deepening.) <br /> <br />On dithering feet upgathered, more and more, <br />Brown strings towards strings of gray, with bristling spines, <br />All migrants from green fields, intent on mire. <br /> <br />Those that were gray, of more abundant spawns, <br />Ramped on the rest and ate them and were eaten. <br /> <br />I saw their bitten backs curve, loop, and straighten, <br />I watched those agonies curl, lift, and flatten. <br /> <br />Whereat, in terror what that sight might mean, <br />I reeled and shivered earthward like a feather. <br /> <br />And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan. <br />And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hid <br />Its bruises in the earth, but crawled no further, <br />Showed me its feet, the feet of many men, <br />And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.<br /><br />Wilfred Owen<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-show/
