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That Match

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8th December 2003

With Christmas coming up, some people might want to write about the football in the trenches story – either for the first time, or again.

The story is in the archive section, if you are unacquainted with the tale/history.

That Match

They lay low in the mud
Dug in. Dog tired
Cold, wet, hungry and alone in their thousands
They listened to the thud, thud, thud
Of bullets biting, feasting
Each projectile
Stopping, only to top up the misery quotient.
Flesh, an easy target,
For it’s tunneling.
Blood, and mud, mixed evenly
Just ingredients
In this half baked notion of war.
The stench, from the trenches, rising
Up, through and beyond nostrils
Forming a celestial travelator
For the death march of dispirited souls, dipped,
In the anointment of inevitability.

The progeny, of those who had at least procreated
Should remember their forebears well.
Those, who had never tasted carnal knowledge,
Stiffened, all over,
In an orgy of tomb filling, womb emptying, carnage.
They were to leave no heirs, no one to grace the family name,
No one to visit their unmarked graves.
We, should remember them all.
We, should remember what man can do, to fellow man.
We, should remember too, what good mankind can do.

At Christmas, we celebrate the one day
When the body count resulted, in a nil-nil draw –
Save for those, mortally wounded, who could hold out no longer.
And on that day, goals were notched
And the only bullets fired, were those shots powered by limbs, stretched
In the middle ground, of No-Mans Land
A makeshift pitch
With no lines, no corner flags, no boundaries, no quarter given
With rifles for goalposts, triggering a target, for two teams,
Hell bent on killing each other, but on this day, peaceably so.
And the legacy lives on.
Armies now fill benches, instead of trenches
They bring every possible emotion, to a cauldron of ‘war’
And the manipulators, stir easily.
But the good in mankind, triumphs, even in defeat
And all winners poeticise, the right way to fight.

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Source: http://footballpoets.org/news/2003/12/08/that-match/