Aftermath
We’d gone to Dublin in search of art
and found William Orpen
dispatched to record the Great War, all those boys
in muck and mire across French countryside
the gallery full of pink, land and sky in pastel shades,
not the colours you expect of brutal conflict.
Bodies abandoned, trenches and dugouts
desert of craters, stumps of buildings
remains of Thiepval, La Boisselle.
A prehistoric burial mound, pale gold in summer light
barbed-wired, tunnelled, mortared.
Mud, baked white, cleansed by sun,
bones scoured by wind and frost, skulls
detached from backbones, feet
scattered among cornflowers.
The final painting an altered landscape,
scrubbed by nature
wounds cleansed by sun and rain.
Later shoals of tiny white butterflies
would come to cloud a faultless sky
above the wonder of poppies.