From Calais to the Salient 2004

Where are the rest huts?
The hospital fields?
Who uncreased the shell-holes?
Why did they yield?!

Why stand there no pickets?
No barbed-wire lines?
But factories, car parks now
Sunk oer their twines!

We feel lost and uncomfortable,
Its puzzling, unreal:
No Aid Posts, not even
Machine guns harsh peal

The roads that we marched down!
Supply dumps of arms!
All gone and familiar
Now only the farms

The farmhouse of Belgium!
Where families so kind
Billeted, fed us; the
Sole grip left behind

For memry we grab them;
Each fragment, each stone,
Scraps of pillbox or shell-case
To feel less alone

Een be they covered
MUST still wait below
Those firesteps, those sandbags,
The dugouts we know?

Ninety years near have passed
Yet surely that scar
Can neer be oer-healed
By a warehouse or car?

And though we cant see them
We search long and again
Then grasp ever tightly
To whateer may remain