Soldiers Poem by Anthony Dawson

So proud to confront the plague of bullets
Enter the mouth of Hades
Armed with eyes of fear, bayonet,
Hatred of the stench filled ground, A heart beating in unison with machine guns


the corpses cry from no-mans land:
'The blood you drink is testament to lunacy';
The message drowned by the barrage of doom,
Thunder and legless soldiers screams

Once the whistle tastes the spit
Its shrill cry orders courageous toes
and cowardly souls to bare all
For the will of the world,
Sending their lightning beyond our reach

Pasts impossible, what did aspiration conjure?
In this time, in a movie of the mind,
In a rut along Convenience Street,
The eye of the eagle cannot be found;
Reverie becomes the terror of war:

Man in mud
A syndrome of France
Is a statue amongst dead trees
His boardwalks cover Ypres
He dirties the Earth's carpet with his brothers carcass
Then howls how the world is alone

Over they go
The curteous, the hurting,
The sentimental dogs
The leash cannot pull them back
to frame their hesitant hearts