Who are these? Why did they hear in twilight?
Wherefore rocks they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicked?
Stroke on of pain,- but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hand palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; But who these hellish?
These are men whose minds of murders,
Institutions murders they once witnessed.
Wading slough of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter if guns and shatter of flying squander
Rucked too thick for these men's extrication.
Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh
Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
Picking at rope-knouts of their scourging;
Snatching after us who smite them, brother,
Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.
Wilfred Owen
YOU ARE READING
Poems from the first world war
Poetrythese at some if my favourite poems from the first world war. And it is really sad that this would happen to inesent life's
