I've tinkered at my bits of rhymes <br />In weary, woeful, waiting times; <br />In doleful hours of battle-din, <br />Ere yet they brought the wounded in; <br />Through vigils of the fateful night, <br />In lousy barns by candle-light; <br />In dug-outs, sagging and aflood, <br />On stretchers stiff and bleared with blood; <br />By ragged grove, by ruined road, <br />By hearths accurst where Love abode; <br />By broken altars, blackened shrines <br />I've tinkered at my bits of rhymes. <br /> <br />I've solaced me with scraps of song <br />The desolated ways along: <br />Through sickly fields all shrapnel-sown, <br />And meadows reaped by death alone; <br />By blazing cross and splintered spire, <br />By headless Virgin in the mire; <br />By gardens gashed amid their bloom, <br />By gutted grave, by shattered tomb; <br />Beside the dying and the dead, <br />Where rocket green and rocket red, <br />In trembling pools of poising light, <br />With flowers of flame festoon the night. <br />Ah me! by what dark ways of wrong <br />I've cheered my heart with scraps of song. <br /> <br />So here's my sheaf of war-won verse, <br />And some is bad, and some is worse. <br />And if at times I curse a bit, <br />You needn't read that part of it; <br />For through it all like horror runs <br />The red resentment of the guns. <br />And you yourself would mutter when <br />You took the things that once were men, <br />And sped them through that zone of hate <br />To where the dripping surgeons wait; <br />And wonder too if in God's sight <br />War ever, ever can be right. <br /> <br />Yet may it not be, crime and war <br />But effort misdirected are? <br />And if there's good in war and crime, <br />There may be in my bits of rhyme, <br />My songs from out the slaughter mill: <br />So take or leave them as you will.<br /><br />Robert William Service<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/forward/
