I snatched two poppies

The sleepy soul to a sleep,We lie all sorts of waysAnd cannot sleep.The wet wind is so cold,And the lurching men so careless,That, should you drop to a doze,Winds’ fumble or men’s feetAre on your face.

What sinister threat lies there.Dragging these anguished limbs, we only knowThis poison-blasted track opens on our camp –On a little safe sleep.But hark! joy – joy – strange joy.Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.Music showering our upturned list’ning faces.Death could drop from the darkAs easily as song –But song only dropped,Like a blind…

To light with smiles the placeWe dream we walk alive,To you I stretch my hands,Hands shut in pitiless tranceIn a land of ruin and woe,The desolate land of France.Dear faces startled and shaken,Out of wild dust and soundsYou yearn to me, lure and saddenMy heart with futile bounds.

But from the mounds there spring up many flowers,Whose beauty well repays their cost of tears.Time, like a sexton, pileth mould on mould,Minutes on minutes till the tombs are high ;But from the dust there fall some grains of gold,And the dead corpse leaves what will never die-It may be but a thought, the nursling…

They knocked a soldier on the head,I mourn the poet who fell dead.And yet I think it was by chance,By oversight you died in France.You were so poor an outward man,So small against your spirit’s span,That Nature, being tired awhile,Saw but your outward human pile;And Nature, who would never letA sun with light still in…

And like the heavens’ white brow,Sometime God’s battle-place,Your blood is quiet now.Your body is a starUnto my thought ;But stars are not too far,And can be caught-Small pools their prisons are.