Poems (Wilfred Owen)

<h2> The Show </h2> <p>My soul looked down from a vague height with Death,<br/> As unremembering how I rose or why,<br/> And saw a sad land, weak with sweats of dearth,<br/> Gray, cratered like the moon with hollow woe,<br/> And fitted with great pocks and scabs of plaques.<br/> <br/> Across its beard, that horror of harsh wire,<br/> There moved thin caterpillars, slowly uncoiled.<br/> It seemed they pushed themselves to be as plugs<br/> Of ditches, where they writhed and shrivelled, killed.<br/> <br/> By them had slimy paths been trailed and scraped<br/> Round myriad warts that might be little hills.<br/> <br/> From gloom's last dregs these long-strung creatures crept,<br/> And vanished out of dawn down hidden holes.<br/> <br/> (And smell came up from those foul openings<br/> As out of mouths, or deep wounds deepening.)<br/> <br/> On dithering feet upgathered, more and more,<br/> Brown strings towards strings of gray, with bristling spines,<br/> All migrants from green fields, intent on mire.<br/> <br/> Those that were gray, of more abundant spawns,<br/> Ramped on the rest and ate them and were eaten.<br/> <br/> I saw their bitten backs curve, loop, and straighten,<br/> I watched those agonies curl, lift, and flatten.<br/> <br/> Whereat, in terror what that sight might mean,<br/> I reeled and shivered earthward like a feather.<br/> <br/> And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan.<br/> And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hid<br/> Its bruises in the earth, but crawled no further,<br/> Showed me its feet, the feet of many men,<br/> And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.<br/></p> <p><SPAN name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"></SPAN></p> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />