Our boots blessed with gold

Went for a rather lovely walk this bank holiday afternoon with the baby and the hubby - up the river, along muddy banks thronged with cowslips and forget me nots, and shaded by white and the palest pink blossomed hawthorn. there were cows munching on clover, birds twittering away, the river slow and leisurely.
The same fields and river banks where Wilfred Owen walked along as a boy - and it was apparently where he came up with some of the lines for Spring Offensive, one of the more goose-bumpy war poems I've read. At once a poem about the beautiful every day, a walk in a sunlit flower filled field. And yet not, this foreboding of menace and dread - terrifying in its contrast. He can have had no idea of what was to come as he played there as a boy, no concept of the terror we humans would inflict upon one another. I feel a little trite using some of it to describe the pleasant walk we had, but it was with us as we walked and talked, picking flowers, showing baby River all this beauty, thinking about how lucky we are.

Marvelling they stood, and watched the long grass swirled

By the May breeze, murmurous with wasp and midge,
For though the summer oozed into their veins
Like the injected drug for their bones' pains,
Sharp on their souls hung the imminent line of grass,
Fearfully flashed the sky's mysterious glass.

Hour after hour they ponder the warm field —
And the far valley behind, where the buttercups
Had blessed with gold their slow boots coming up,
Where even the little brambles would not yield,
But clutched and clung to them like sorrowing hands;
They breathe like trees unstirred.