Topic: War
A sonnet on the Iraq War I hope readers will appreciate this sonnet of mine which was recently published.by George Dance
(libertarian)
Monday, May 18, 2009
To my readers (if any 8) :
As I wrote last December, I have been spending most of the period since the last U.S. election concentrating on writing poetry. Most of that is clearly off-topic for this column.
To not lose touch, I am offering one of my few poems on a political theme, in this case the Iraq War. This may be newsworthy because of the new administration pledged to end that conflict. It may also be newsworthy because the poem was published this week in the Other Voices International cyber-anthology of world poetry. http://www.othervoicespoetry.org/
While the poem can be read as a stand-alone, I think it enhances it for the reader to know one allusion: the reference in the first and second lines to William Butler Yeats' masterpiece, "The Second Coming" (written in the aftermath of World War I), which ends with the lines:
And what rough beast, its hour come at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15527
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Ideas of March
[sung to a Sousa beat]
Shuffling off to Babylon to be born again, in knife-sharp lines of infantry, they march past tanks and massed artillery, machinery themselves -- No pause to mourn the dead, to feel the baking heat or the dust that cakes itself in every liquid pore and blinds the eyes -- Just marching onward -- Just the thought of vengeance to be theirs once more -- Eyes forward, not to note the weeping mother by the burned hut, or spy the ragged children that gather in gangs, whispering to one another, "They killed my father; one day I will kill them" -- Forward they march to serve their country well, to die again and be reborn in hell.
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