A hundred years ago these fields yielded
grief, fear, bodies, blood, and mud.
Now, wheat dries golden in the sun,
leaves wave in the breeze over crater scars,
While the earth returns bones and bombshells
to the surface: a century of slowly expulsing the detritus of war
extruding shrapnel from its pockmarked body with the new grass.
.
.
Watching the history channel, and amazed to learn that even today, Belgian farmers keep bins in their yards for unexploded shells they find, and the army comes by regularly to collect and destroy them. What a legacy a hundred years later! I’m just finishing Anne Perry’s World War One series which has made trench warfare very vivid.
Shawn L. Bird 
[…] via poem-aftermath — Shawn L. Bird […]
Things which are buried, constantly get heaved up. It is wise of the Belgians and French Flemings to keep close watch on what is still there, in the ways of unexploded ordnance.
It would be horrible for some poor farmer to be blown to smithereens by a 100 year old bomb!
Talk about your dangerous farmlands. And the treasures reaped after so many, many years of exploitation and devastation..
Exactly. Imagine how they felt to come back to their land, knowing so many human remains and war junk riddled it.
I can’t imagine the horrors of those trenches.
So many places with unexploded bombs of various wars. I heard an NPR piece on Viet Nam where they teach children in school to look out for them. And a few months ago in the city of Bath, they found an unexploded bomb from WWII.
It is heinous at so many levels.