Task One: What is the poem about?
Justly your response with quotes

Approaching Unseen Poetry
Mametz Wood (2005)
Owen Sheers
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.

Task Four: Answer the questions below
What are the main themes of the poem?


What is the writer's attitude toward
conflict and how is this portrayed in the
poem?
What could the enjambment suggest in this
poem?
Think about the sounds of the poem, how
do they reflect its content?