Three poems based on the first world war, produce of this week's residential course:
This is most meant to emulate a classic war poem in the style of Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon.
Please
Please tell me of riverbanks,
Tell me of hay,
Tell me of sun on a hot july day
Tell me that England is still somewhere near
And the willows still weep into waters so clear.
Please sing me a song now
And tell me of dreams
That somewhere are children
With strawberries and cream
Tell me the names on these endless long lists
Are on there for something that really exists.
Don't talk about mud
Don't talk about guns
Or fathers back home
Who can't bury their sons
Please tell me in this sea of fear, madness, gore
That there's someone can tell me just what it's all for.
This focusses more on the dehumanising element of warfare.
Steel, Ice, Fire
Steel, ice, fire
That has to be the reality
It is not a case of what is,
But a case of what must be,
What to become.
Steel - a hardness
Rigid silver under the cold heat
Of an unforgiving star.
The key, oddly, is not the way
The curiously still pipe points at the other side
But the way it points at you
(Or I, he, she, we, it)
Points into you
Gives you its hardness
For you must become steel.
Ice - a coldness
Around you
(Or us, we, it)
Quivering, stiff fingers
Become numb
Quivering in time and rhythm
Your (its) mind follows.
Fire
Enough to melt the ice? No.
Enough for what, then?
Enough to kill.
Perhaps more than enough
But it doesn't know or care
Not time to be released
To be glad
To be or
Perhaps
Not to be
But there is no question
No answer
It is dead. In the mud.
It. Or... you?
This last has more of a personal element; my great grandfather was responsible for a tracing department in WWI - he oversaw the copying of all the maps used by British forces in Europe.
The Map Maker
Transparent in the half-light
Underneath, a world appears
Contours, villages, and streams
Rivers, forests, lakes and meres.
Tracing over line by line
A trench, a field, a winter flood
He settles back, then English camps
Appear in inks as red as blood.
Neatly, eyes sharp, hand poised, still
The maps are drawn to show the way
That men will stumble, shaking, blind
Upon some muddy autumn day
At last the man lays down his pens
His night's work done, with one slow breath
He thinks of men fighting for the world he has drawn
And shivers a little to think of their death
