Dead Man’s Dump
by Isaac Rosenberg
   
The plunging limbers over the shattered track  
Racketed with their rusty freight,  
Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,  
And the rusty stakes like sceptres old  
To stay the flood of brutish men 5
Upon our brothers dear.  
   
From night till night and now.  
The wheels lurched over sprawled dead  
But pained them not, though their bones crunched,  
Their shut mouths made no moan. 10
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,  
Man born of man, and born of woman,  
And shells go crying over them  
From night till night and now.  
   
Earth has waited for them, 15
All the time of their growth  
Fretting for their decay:  
Now she has them at last!  
In the strength of their strength  
Suspended — stopped and held. 20
   
What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?  
Earth! have they gone into you!  
Somewhere they must have gone,  
And flung on your hard back  
Is their soul’s sack 25
Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.  
Who hurled them out? Who hurled?  
   
None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass,  
Or stood aside for the half used life to pass  
Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth, 30
When the swift iron burning bee  
Drained the wild honey of their youth.  
   
What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre,  
Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,  
Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed, 35
Immortal seeming ever?  
Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,  
A fear may choke in our veins  
And the startled blood may stop.  
   
The air is loud with death, 40
The dark air spurts with fire,  
The explosions ceaseless are.  
Timelessly now, some minutes past,  
Those dead strode time with vigorous life,  
Till the shrapnel called ‘An end!’ 45
But not to all. In bleeding pangs  
Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,  
Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.  
   
Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel 50
Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love,  
The impetuous storm of savage love.  
Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in chemic smoke,  
What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul  
With lightning and thunder from your mined heart, 55
Which man’s self dug, and his blind fingers loosed?  
   
A man’s brains splattered on  
A stretcher-bearer’s face;  
His shook shoulders slipped their load,  
But when they bent to look again 60
The drowning soul was sunk too deep  
For human tenderness.  
   
They left this dead with the older dead,  
Stretched at the cross roads.  
   
Burnt black by strange decay 65
Their sinister faces lie,  
The lid over each eye,  
The grass and coloured clay  
More motion have than they,  
Joined to the great sunk silences. 70
   
Here is one not long dead;  
His dark hearing caught our far wheels,  
And the choked soul stretched weak hands  
To reach the living word the far wheels said,  
The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light, 75
Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels  
Swift for the end to break  
Or the wheels to break,  
Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight.  
   
Will they come? Will they ever come? 80
Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,  
The quivering-bellied mules,  
And the rushing wheels all mixed  
With his tortured upturned sight.  
So we crashed round the bend, 85
We heard his weak scream,  
We heard his very last sound,  
And our wheels grazed his dead face.  
   

limbers — two-wheeled wagons pulled by horses or mules
ichor — In Greek mythology, ichor was what the gods had flowing through their veins instead of blood.
 
chemic — Not just chemical, in the sense that everything consists of chemcical elements, but actually have having a connection with chemistry as a field, which in this case was responsible for poison gas