Poems: The Show by Wilfred Owen — Read

My soul looked down from a vague height with Death, / As unremembering how I rose or why, / And saw a sad land, weak with sweats of dearth, / Gray, cratered like the moon with hollow woe, / And fitted with great pocks and scabs of plaques.

Across its beard, that horror of harsh wire, / There moved thin caterpillars, slowly uncoiled. / It seemed they pushed themselves to be as plugs / Of ditches, where they writhed and shrivelled, killed.

By them had slimy paths been trailed and scraped / Round myriad warts that might be little hills.

From gloom's last dregs these long-strung creatures crept, / And vanished out of dawn down hidden holes.

(And smell came up from those foul openings / As out of mouths, or deep wounds deepening.)

On dithering feet upgathered, more and more, / Brown strings towards strings of gray, with bristling spines, / All migrants from green fields, intent on mire.

Those that were gray, of more abundant spawns, / Ramped on the rest and ate them and were eaten.

I saw their bitten backs curve, loop, and straighten, / I watched those agonies curl, lift, and flatten.

Whereat, in terror what that sight might mean, / I reeled and shivered earthward like a feather.

And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan. / And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hid / Its bruises in the earth, but crawled no further, / Showed me its feet, the feet of many men, / And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.