Breath

The air over Flanders once swelled with their breath,

Rising from a web of frozen trenches in winter.

The life from their lungs crystallized in small individual puffs and

Married together into clouds of fog that rolled across the front lines.

From festering crater holes and dugouts in summer,

They exhaled their exertions in hot grunts and ragged groans;

They pushed over craggy mud-covered fields by the inch,

Leaving their brothers one-by-one by the thousands behind.

Millions of pounding hearts

Left an indelible mark on this place.

We feel it wandering along the still pockmarked landscape,

We see it in the harvest of vegetables and iron each year.

Their buttons and shoes;

Their shell casings and shrapnel and spoons;

Their bones.

The earth breathes them back to us in spring

And we pick them up and put them airtight under glass.

---