In Ghostly Silence in Anzac Cove

 The trenches built on this battlefield often revealed shocking sights of war. Shallow graves and bodies buried in haste in no-man's land. The winter rains exposed decaying bodies in the trench walls. The soldiers paused to reflect between battles, looking into the eyes of the dead, every corpse a story to tell. No wonder they did not want to talk about what they saw if they were fortunate to return home. 

In Ghostly Silence in Anzac Cove

Unsmiling skeleton, what thoughts remain,
Within your empty bones, the lingering pain?
What heart-breaking story barred you from old age,
Now whispered only by the wind across this stage.

Where bone armies lie, in fractured array,
Cast down, forgotten, beneath the light of day;
Wrapped in ghostly silence, your sad tale’s decay,
And drift through the hills where shadows sway.

Beside the spent forms of soldiers’ brave,
Rest sun-bleached skulls, mouths open, never to crave;
Their absent souls have fled the lonely land,
Leaving only silence, scattered like sand.

Gone! the agony, the flesh, the blood, the ruined lives,
Derelict bones sketch the missing forms, hollow eyes;
Gone! the hatred, the screams, the soldier’s cries,
Gone! the ravenous vermin, the swarms of flies.

Gone! the young men’s hopes, the dreams that died,
Everything lost, swept along the tide;
In silence, within these mounds of earth,
Lie the abandoned, the forsaken, denied rebirth.

Silently the broken bones of the good, the bad, the lost,
Lie in solitude, cold beneath the cost;
The grim remains, a testament, stark and grave,
To the soldiers caught in war’s unyielding wave.

Unsmiling skeletons, what secrets do you hold?
What echoes linger in your silence cold?
May wordless silence, and the whispering waves,
Carry your memory beyond these graves.

Written By: Alan.Clark@WW1POET