Echoes
A poem
The count of years lies at one hundred and eight
A span few living can measure in witness
though the tale is familiar and worn
Brimming with history’s regrets
Scarce had the century learned to crawl
when its puberty came crashing upon it without relent
And vested each day with misery unspoken prior
Of hunger pangs, and footsore slogs
to evade the maw of industrial slaughter
The ravages men at the peak of their fury
visit on the foe
or the homes they once dwelt in
Here, scattered on muddied fields
with trees hunched like struck matches
and skeletons both metal and bone
was wrought the carnage of the new age, with its joysticks
On land scored by fires both ancient and new
Whose warriors sleep with the same rodents
that boldly crawl over them, drink their water, sup on their food
Gnaw on their digits, in the cold dark of night
Where eyes did scour the heavens
Once for the buzz of biplanes,
now for the whine of lethal insects sweep
Where hordes once pooled
like schools of fish, or flights of birds
Swirling in the blue
Before their burial mounds fell under gnashing teeth
and grinding gears
Still
of a morning, birdsong echoes
Oh my! This is stunning in its depth and breadth whilst wrapping up an entire century of slaughter and ending it with birdsong.
Loving the imagery and the language.
Mike, what strikes me most is the depth of witness you’re attempting here. You’re not just recounting war; you’re trying to hold an entire century of it in the same field: from mud, biplanes, and rats to joysticks and the “lethal insects” of our age. That sweep is profoundly ambitious.
What lands is how carefully you show that while the machinery evolves, the human condition beneath it hardly does: hunger, exhaustion, bodies returned to the same dark ecology of earth and rodents. The battlefield becomes less a place than a continuum of history’s fury.
And then that quiet closing turn, “Still / of a morning, birdsong echoes.”
After all the wreckage, you allow the smallest persistence of life to speak.
It feels like you’re reminding us that history scars the land deeply, but it never quite silences it.