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This is a 'found poem' using images taken from 'Akenfield' a book written by Ronald Blythe about the experiences of a young Suffolk farmer named Leonard Thompson, sent to Gallipoli in 1915 and given the job of burial duties. It is set on 5th June 1915.
POETRY FORM: Found Poem
lyrics
Slamming Flies
Arriving at the Dardanelles -
guns flashing, the sound of rifle fire,
they heaved our ship up to the shore.
my nerves as taut as cheese wire.
We sat there waiting for the dawn
and saw a big marquee
that made us think of village fetes.
We had to go and see.
Like boys going to a circus,
we all rushed up to get in -
but found it all laced up –
and then we heard the buzzing.
Unlaced and pulled back,
It was full of dead Englishmen.
with their eyes wide open.
We hoped we knew none of them.
We all stopped talking.
I’d never seen a dead man before -
then three hundred - all at once!
God damn this bloody war.
The next day we reached ‘dead ground’,
where the enemy couldn’t see you,
and we wandered it in the evening –
we had little else to do.
asking about friends
who had arrived
a month before.
Had they survived?
“How’s Ernie Taylor?”
“Have you seen Albert Jones?”
“Ernie and Albert? They’re gone”
Just a few of the million bones.
It taught us that our names
were unimportant
It taught us that our chances
were scant.
We reached a trench so full of dead men
that we could hardly move.
There was a cloying stink.
There was nothing left to prove.
For a while there was nothing
but the living hordes
being sick upon the dead.
Splattering the boards
We set to work to bury them,
pushed them into the sides
of the trench –
there was nowhere left to hide.
but bits kept getting uncovered
and sticking out at angles,
like people in a badly made bed.
All flop and hang and dangles.
Hands were the worst,
they would escape from the sand,
pointing, begging, even waving!
Across the destroyed land.
There was one we all shook
as we passed,
saying “Good Morning”
Ignoring as it gassed.
The bottom of the trench
was springy like a mattress
because of all the bodies underneath.
A carpet of battle dress.
Then the flies came
and lined the walls completely
with a density that was like a moving cloth.
Rippling, discreetly.
We killed millions by slamming
our spades along trench walls
but the next night it would be just as bad.
Clanging like a church bell calls.
We wept,
not because we were scared
but because we were so dirty.
None of us were spared.
Our Souls withered and died.
In this place of fetid smell
and we, the uninvited guests,
were all damned to hell.
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