John E Marks

The bloody poppy

Tuesday 6th July 2021 7:00 pm

In England’s fields, few poppies grow,
Chemical fertilisers have seen to that
The land is still owned by those same fey aristocrats
Who’ve plundered and marauded for untold centuries.

On the slivers of common land that remain
The common sparrow still bravely sings,
Scarce heard amid the empty political posturings.
No-one listens to the Glorious Dead. Lip service, instead.

Few of the ‘great and the good’
Remember the ordinary soldier
Who still has no home in England’s land
Where, it is made abundantly clear,
Trespassers will most definitely be prosecuted.
Year after year, after bloody year.

A few still bow our heads for the magnificent few
The young aircrew
Who flew their endless sorties
In the summer of 1940.

Now in England veterans queue at food banks in the rain
They don’t boast, don’t even mention the terror and boredom of war,
Or what it was all for.
Everyday we break faith with these dead broke
Blokes, who still cannot sleep, nor find repose,
In any land where the bloody poppy grows.

🌷(5)

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Comments

John Marks

Thu 8th Jul 2021 19:01

Thank you anonymous soldier - your eloquent testimony speaks volumes. People, generally, do not want to know the hell that soldiers go through whilst serving this country of ours. Your testimony teaches those with the guts to truly listen.

Siegfried Sassoon, another soldier and another poet, told it exactly how it was and still is for British soldiers on active service.

SUICIDE IN THE TRENCHES

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

ZTK Space

Wed 7th Jul 2021 18:16

John, Keith, Greg. I very rarely make comments or entry these days. I am one of the jangled wrecks you refer to. I have since Gulf Ops had a straight 8 hour kip since 1991 about five times. I average about 2 - 4 hours kip a night unless tanked up with the only medicinal still capable of providing respite, alas, it does not do well to medicate on a single malt, particularly when Social Services are using your own children as a gagging tool.

The poppy! One could almost ask, what is it, what does it now symbolise. It is a flower where controversy in colour alone as one time serious and respected news casters follow the lines of hate and jealousy, and opt to push for a colour change.

Poppies are red, and are still upon fields of Northern Europe and beyond. I do fear it is wilting now, for all reason of its reference has nowt but politic to hide the Sun.

As a former soldier, with years of PTSD on board, it does not get any better. You may learn coping skills but if anything, some events become the more frightening. I will give an example.

I was held up at gun point during The Balkan War. There was a guy with us who was serbian who latched on. HVO wollers tailed us and confronted us. We were at the bottom of some steps in a built up area, and they sealed off any escape exit. An asian man, perhaps mercenary, had his hand on his pistol, which was tucked down the back of his pants. He was stood interogating the serbian who was crying stating they were going to kill him. so he is stood with his hand on his gat ready to just................... one of us, who were working for UNPROFOR, began to try to escape. He kept trying to make it up the stairs but the armed militia kept pushing him down. As an ex soldier, you know that if you're going to go in you go in hard full vocal until you breathe no more. But this woller, he was silent as he kept trying to push past the armed militia.................he just said nothing in a half hearted attempt and he was an ex soldier.

we eventually were set free, the man ran away as fast as he could.

over the years, you replay a whole myriad of events that, even if no direct threat, became all the more powerful for indirect psychological trauma.

recently I have visited that incident. I myself scared, unsure whether it was the neg seventeen celsius or fear thart had my teeth chattering. I stood my ground but know, temperature has nothing to do with it, even if the interogation went on for over 30 minutes.

As i visit that place, I have been crying for the state the man was in, who silently tried to push past the armed militia. To begin to understand what must have been really happening inside his heart and psyche, is to visit a place no man, no man, or woman should ever have to be.

We are all wrecks. We are trained, we learn to bare it, we all, want 'away' at the end of the day. As you understand the mass of male cull on regular schedule, you begin to weep for what is thought of human males. And there, you know just what a disgust and disgrace, our rulers and class act actually are, our engineers of hate.

We look to food banks for food, we see former acquaintances and know the wars in the middle east are ilegal. You weep for muslim as a brother, so too irish or african, russian too. You look at the history of Arnheim, Flounders and even Culloden...............and there is an emptiness that a chalice has no bottom for the liquid to settle.

It doesn't compute, and you begin............to wretch for all that was thought of you. Thoughts that, to this day, they uphold as they use your own family to gag you from telling the truth.

There is a poppy, I could hold it in my hand, I could hold a rose, a daffodil, a thistle.......................you could even think of Spikes The New Rose and still, all of it, has become lost unless, marketable by fake.

A great poem I will dwell over for some years and place in a collage of understanding that persists only solemn tears.

..............'They Just Don't Understand.'

keith jeffries

Tue 6th Jul 2021 23:23

John,
Thank you indeed for this poem. The land owned by aristocrats was at one time the land of monasteries and convents who fed the hungry, provided hospitality, employed local people and educated the young. More recently the bodies of our war dead lie in foreign fields or watery graves. The survivors of horror are now jangled wrecks incapable of work or re entering society. Poppies still grow where the heroes lie below. Men and women who never knew privilege, only duty without any real gratitude.

Thank you for this

Keith

Greg Freeman

Tue 6th Jul 2021 23:03

I would beg to differ on the poppies, John. I've never seen so many as this year, while on holiday in the north-east. Fields of them, and many especially planted on grass verges by councils and the like. But I appreciate that's not really the point of this poem. And certainly great swathes of the north-east are owned by the Duke of Northumberland and his kind. England is in a right old state.

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