Greenlane Poetry

Patriots

From Yorkshire Wales and Middlesex
At Arras in the dawn revealed
Youth and pride and might of homeland
Mingled with the ditch and field

Now a cypress tree stands sentry
Silent in the slow new dawn
In the still of Autumn evening
When the windows light the lawn

Thirty names upon a panel
Forty panels to a bay
Twenty bays to see at Arras
Forty more another day

Spent at Amiens or Bethune
In the fields of Picardy
In a hundred towns and cities
From the mountains to the sea

Rolling beet fields wheat and poppies
Are the graves of soldiers now
Sons of Leeds or Lens or Lubeck
Patriots beneath the plough