Break of Day in the Trenches
Isaac Rosenberg
1890 to 1918
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The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet’s
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you touched this English hand
You will do the same a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
torn fields of France.
What do you see in eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine my ear is safe—
Just a little white with dust.