In Flanders Fields Museum, Ieper (Ypres) 2014

All day a poem's been following me about Poems are everywhere here Hanging on banners, hiding in books Marching from installation One poem weeps to see the ravaged countryside A charnel house of mud and rats and bones Another poem's struck dumb Before the Flanders' quagmire, its abyss Before the blind eyes of the gassed and shelled And here are the shells themselves All present and correct All new as ninepence The poem sickens to see that artefacts survive While dead men's sperm's unborn Spent in the tombs that riddle battlefields