Big Tent July 23rd

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.