The Big Tent prompt this week was to write a poem inspired by your own favourite poem. I have two favourite poems, learned at school: Wilfred Owen’s Anthem For Doomed Youth and Dulce Et Decorum Est. Here’s a bit of the first one (we’re not supposed to post the whole thing because of copyright issues):
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
I love how that third line sounds like the guns it describes when you read it aloud.
I wrote this one a while back, in protest at the underfunding of the British military. I haven’t tried to emulate Owen’s brilliance; just used it as a starting point for my own view:
Afghan Anthem
Bullets sing the soldier’s
last rites; road mines
play his death march.
Soldiers die, they shrug.
Newspapers cry –
for a day, a week.
Families lament each
neglected death,
each unremembered anniversary,
as unelected men decline
to sign cheques, and
soldiers die.
I have the funniest readers in the blogosphere (not necessarily ha ha…)