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 of 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 wood 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 mid dance-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.
OWEN SHEERS
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