Roland E.T Mhasvi The Flowers of Yesterday. An Anthology of Poems

THE FLOWERS OF YESTERDAY

Move over, Green Man, the war-made Heroes
Are returned from the shrapnel-chastened bush
Where children were planted in bomb-chumed ear
Ploughed down in mass graves of furrowed acres,
Where crosses matted the black eart like strawa.
Watered in the blood spills of the bush war,
Children sprouted through the battle-worn soils,
And everywhere clamoured in flaming shoots.

When the children were war-forged into men,
Flowering upon the rocky outcrops
Of the war-torn lands, they crept down the hills,
Besieged the valleys in blistering red
Blotting with blood the homely greens and browns
That basked in the yellow calm of the sun!
They flamed through the cold nights of their waking,
And shook the sleeping world to smoking dawns.

As the world woke up to the red war-men
Whose bullet voices cracked above the land,
And rang the changes of the new Order,
The Old world of high mountains and low vales,
Of old plains that nestled towns and cities,
Rolled away and was dissolved into Myth,
And uncovered levelied lands that stretched far
To the deadly Flats of re-built Futures

Forged in the foreign climes of wrong ideals,
Little green man cringed in the darkest nooks
Of the new Garden, like a thing forbid.
The flowers of yesterday had become
The weeds of Tomorrow, and the war-men
Linger in the fields, whetting their blood shot
To blast in the burst of a new assault,
The star-born weeds that palled the night-found fields.

You Flowers of Yesterday bloomed faintly
In the dead-level glare of the West sun:
On shrinking hills you shrivelled in silence,
Whilst all round you the plains seethed and howled,
Warring gainst your hills in the spreading gloom.
As the plains darkened into the Future,
The Old Sun kissed your sinking hills farewell,
And, soon, you were but twinkles in the gloom.