Mametz wood

For years afterwards the farmers found them-

The wasted young, turning up under their plough blades

As they tended the land back into itself

 

A chit of bone, the china plate if a shoulder blade,

The relic of a finger, the blown

And broken bird's egg of a skull

 

All mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white

Across this field where they were told to walk, not run,

Towards the woods and its nesting machine guns

 

And even now the earth stands sentinel,

Reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened

Like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin

 

This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave,

A broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm,

Their skeletons paused in a danse-macabre

 

In boots that outlasted them

Their socketed heads tilted back at an angle

And their jaws, those that have them, dropped open

 

As if the notes they had sung

Have only now, with this unearthing,

Slipped from their absent tongues.

 

Mametz wood, Owen Sheers

 

This is a little diorama to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the battle of the somme.

Based on this image: www.npg.org.uk/whatson/national-memory-local-stories/reso...

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