Unmarked Poem by Roy Blokker

Trapped within his chrysaline shell
Buried deep under the ground
Scattered around Ypres, Arras,
His unmarked tomb he wrote
And wrote and wrote,
His voice clogged with precious earth,
His eyes unseeing but his heart,
His heart beat cold
With passion.
A hundred years between us
Yet the ground is still so hard,
Like a river run dry,
The words lumps of bedrock
Cutting my naked feet,
My bleeding feet
Resurrecting the river's flow,
Seeping, making mud,
Churning, uplifting soil
And hasty wood.

We all are poets, all unknown,
We all wade rivers etched in blood
Down canyons drenched in dust,
Past lost places.
I listen for Last Post
At the Menin Gate,
Taps at Pearl at dusk,
My ears bleeding
Adding to the flood, the bath,
Watching the Ghost Dancers,
Poems locked in motion
Taken by bullets,
Screeching like Gilgamesh,
Enkidu seven days dead
The maggots feasting in his nose,
Inconsolable King, mortal King
Himself trapped forever
On rhythmic stone tablets,
Author unknown.

And I cannot let go
The thought
The words
All those magnificent
Words,
Majestic defeat,
The kinship
The eternity
Of the finite plain
Soaring.