The roses of Picardy are blooming,

Red like the blood we will spill,

The sun shines onto the yellow wheat

Which drifts in the summer breezes

Sill, we face the Saxons, brothers-in-arms,

And this quiet landscape will soon explode,

With all the bloody gore of war.

We swore we would survive.

My tommy gun spat bullets for days

My hands bloody, burnt and raw.

Sweet Christ what is it all for?

 

After his four years in France

He returned to no job, dead friends.

His old terraced house demolished, 

Replaced by the flats no-one wants

To house all the kids he didn’t have.

After the armistice no flowers bloomed for him.

Time spread-out like the AIDS

Quilt, of decades later.

Besmirched by his bloody innocence,

He grew cancers of all sorts.

All the women he never wed

Pointed him out on his way to work

Said he'd married the dead instead.  

Now all I have left of him

Is this strange, humbling music of remembrance.