More Family Business

I don't remember ever telling you about my great uncle, Isaac Rosenberg, the WWI poet and painter. Of course, I never knew him. He died at age 26 in WWI, totally unprepared to fight the war he signed up for, or so it seems from the books I read about him and the family lore.
He came from a brood that was marked by singularly bad luck. As I have said, though his family was composed of pacifists, he signed up to fight so his mother would have enough money to live and to feed the others. They lived in a one or two room flat on the east end of London.
His father and mother, my great-grandparents on my mother's side, hated each other, so my great=grandfather left her with the kids and went off to sell rags and bones in the countryside.
His sister, my grandmother, who I never met because she lived in South Africa for most of her life, had one accident after another. I may have told you this; she was run over by one of the first cars to traverse the streets of Capetown SA, and was dragged by a bus as my mother watched in shock. Her ear was run over by a bike as she walked with my mom. And she fell down the stairs into boiling water once. Her sister Annie died as an old woman as she walked across the bridge on a windy day in London, her umbrella lifted by an errant breeze that deposted her face first into a hod of wet cement. His brother, who emigrated to Chicago in the 20s, got involved with Bugsy Segal's gang and disappeared without a trace, as people in Chicago are prone to do sometimes if they get mixed up with people they shouldn't have.
By the age of 26, he had produced several plays in verse, a few portraits that are in the Tate Gallery and elsewhere these days, and a bulging volume of poems, the most memorable of which are frequently anthologized. The most famous is probably "Break of Day in the Trenches." I will attempt to paste that poem below.

Break of Day in the Trenches
The darkness crumbles away
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy (5)
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies,
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German (10)
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life, (15)
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame (20)
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver -what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in men's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe, (25)
Just a little white with the dust.
- Isaac Rosenberg