'Essex Farm', Yser Canal
John Greening
We stop at Flanders Fields
and Owen's Coaches
draw up in the same layby.
Watery sun. A farmhouse
Opposite has gone nowhere
since pnuemonia blew you
away from this hole in
the canal-side and it was
nineteen-eighteen. A factory
smoking silently through bare
pollarded poplars on the
far bank. Here, your poem.
There, parked tankers. The coach
driver is pacing, tie over
beer belly. No larks,
just the passing of traffic.
And no chance of a poppy
that isn't paper or plastic.
The children among the graves
are dressed as if they were
themselves a floral tribute.
During the First World War, the British Army in the Ypres salient had an advanced dressing station at Essex Farm by the Yser Canal, where the war cemetery now lies. It is said that John McCrae was inspired to write his famous poem In Flanders Fields in May 1915. McCrae died of pneumonia in 1918.
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