Mametz Wood by Owen Sheers

Today's poem is Mametz Wood by Owen Sheers.
It describes the uncovering (in 2005) of a mass graves of soldiers buried in 1916.

The following images summarise the poem:

First, we see Mametz Wood in 1916 - destroyed.

Secondly, we see Mametz Wood as it is today - it appears to have recovered and the war is forgotten.

Finally, we see the grave of men who died in 1916, but were uncovered in 2005. This shows that, even though the war seems to have been forgotten, it still affects us.

Now use the link to revise the poem.

Use these headings to prepare your page for what you will learn.

•Content (what is the poem about?):

•Context (what was happening at the time?):

•Language:

1.

2.

3.

•Structure:

1.

2.

•Poet’s ideas/aim/thoughts:

•Effect on the reader:

Mametz Wood 

For years afterwards the farmers found them –
the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades
as they tended the land back into itself.

A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade,
the relic of a finger, the blown
and broken bird’s egg of a skull,

all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white
across this field where they were told to walk, not run,
towards the wood and its nesting machine guns.

And even now the earth stands sentinel,
reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened
like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.

This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave,
a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm,
their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre

in boots that outlasted them,
their socketed heads tilted back at an angle
and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.

As if the notes they had sung
have only now, with this unearthing,
slipped from their absent tongues.

By Owen Sheers

Mametz Wood