In Flanders Fields Museum, Ieper (Ypres) 2014 Poem by Sheena Blackhall

All day a poem's been following me about
Poems are everywhere here
Hanging on banners, hiding in books
Marching from installation

One poem weeps to see the ravaged countryside
A charnel house of mud and rats and bones

Another poem's struck dumb
Before the Flanders' quagmire, its abyss
Before the blind eyes of the gassed and shelled

And here are the shells themselves
All present and correct
All new as ninepence

The poem sickens to see that artefacts survive
While dead men's sperm's unborn
Spent in the tombs that riddle battlefields