| Chill, break of day
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| A light frost thawing
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| Sun, pale and grey
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| A spectral morning
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| Tractors crawl, horsepower straining
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| Carve the earth, the ploughshares turning
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| The sod that hides where dead men lie
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| The lost and fallen of wars gone by
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| Gathering the iron harvest
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| Reminders of their bloody madness
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| Whose bones in furrows sometimes rise
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| To plead to be identified
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| To join the ranks of comrade soldiers
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| Buried beneath the bleached, white crosses
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| Names and numbers cut in stone
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| The regiment they called their home
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| The age they reached, the day they died
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| Their memory is all that does survive
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| In tended graves they rest in peace
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| Their battle finally over
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| The rolling, trembling thunder
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| Rides the ridge of Bazentin
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| Detonations scatter clouds of crows
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| The tree line offers refuge
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| To the wide-eyed, startled deer
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| Launch, plunging through the bracken
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| They head into the shadows
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| Of the High Wood
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| The oaks majestic, standing proud and tall
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| Holding their position on a landscape lost in time
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| The roots dug in the sore contested ground
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| The gnarled and twisted timbers betray the battle scars of yore
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| The wood will rise, the wood will fall, the circle is unbroken
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| The wounds will heal in rings of time, the circle is unbroken
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| Half buried in the forest floor decay
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| Broken, rusting weaponry beneath the fallen leaves
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| The shells that failed still hold their deadly load
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| Dormant in the undergrowth, their promise only stalled
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| The wood will rise, the wood will fall, the circle is unbroken
|
| The wounds will heal in rings of time, the circle is unbroken
|
| The wood will rise, the wood will fall, the circle is unbroken
|
| The wounds will heal in rings of time, the circle is unbroken
|
| In the darkness of the High Wood
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| It’s so dense I can hardly breathe
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| A stark and muffled silence
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| I stand alone amongst the trees
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| Are they ghosts or moving shadows?
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| Are they spirits gone before?
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| Are these the restless souls still wandering
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| The ones that were forsaken
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| In the High Wood? |