Trench Warfare Today and Now

A poem found amid ruins of faces which once knew love

Over hot coffee
I study faces
From almost a hundred years ago
Torn apart in the First World War
Which was neither the first nor the last
But one of the most horrific.

Mud without romance
Trench warfare
Massive artillery bombardments
Machine guns pouring lines of fire
Flame throwers
Poison gas
Rotten corpses unburied by shells
Poison air
Tanks
Barbed wire
Mud
Splintered forests
Rats
Lice
Typhoid
Dysentery
Men lived in trenches
You stand up
Bullets punch your skull
Shell fragments rip your face
Mud sweat blood & rat feces
Bacteria
Viruses
Fungi
Protozoans

Mud
Unseen things breeding
Everywhere on everything
Septic
Eating
You alive
While
Naked
Inside filthy, uniformed
Ragged Love
Zero privacy
Ahhh…my gut screams!
Red mud pours out my ass
And cements me to Earth.

Oh, my Mother would’ve loved it,
Not the killing or the pain or the horror,
But the truth of horror
Uncovered
Right here on my kitchen table
As I drink hot, black coffee
And turned the page.

Extreme high number of injuries above the chest in the trenches marked the
Great War of 1914-1918.
Art blossomed by men deranged
And rearranged
Driven
Striven to
Paint and write madness to liberate them selves from horror.
Masks by a corps of artists covered mangled faces
Rescued from battlefield carnage.
My mind makes a collage of masks and faceless faces
From this Smithsonian magazine article.
My Mother would have loved it,
So curious was she for all things true and weird.
Over an image of my own face
Black coffee splashes
The color of war.

Source of Inspiration:
Alexander, Caroline. “Faces of War: Amid the horrors of World War I, a corps of artists brought hope to soldiers disfigured in the trenches.” Smithsonian Magazine, February 2007. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/mask.html.

 

William Dudley Bass
February 2007 &
18 November 2008
4 March 2012
Seattle, Washington

NOTE: Written in 2007, edited and first published in my earlier blog Cultivate and Harvest on 18 November 2008 at http://cultivateandharvest.blogspot.com/2008/11/trench-warfare-today-and-now.html. Then edited and re-published here this 4 March 2012. Thank you.

Copyright © 2007, 2008, 2012, 2016 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship of and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.

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