content warning: blood, death

Crags of rock crumble like
cracked toffee under the sun.
Crops fester under peat and withered soil
until there’s nothing left
but dried clumps of dirt.

Digging for potatoes until sundown,
a primordial affair now pestilent.
Upturning decay in the puddled fields
of blackened leaves and rot.
The diggers are like pilgrims
in a land they no longer recognise.

Punished by a belated recital of promises for
food stocks that prematurely ran dry.
Though the rich still feasted upon tariffed maize.

Digging ditches for ten pence a day
that will not fill bodies
puffed with air, not gruel.

Dead not by violence, but a cruel death still.

The last nail in the coffin
nicks the knuckles of the burier.
Blood seeps into the body
sheathed in a dull brown shroud.

And so,

those who stockpiled their pence
are laid to rest in a sepulchre.
Bones hidden in the dark.

Not sun-bleached like the bones
found in fields
of ancestors gone by.