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Thread: My Poems: anti-war, light verse, and about poetry.

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    Registered User SteveH's Avatar
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    My Poems: anti-war, light verse, and about poetry.

    In Memory of Wilfred Owen

    Glory's the lie wars cancer feed upon,
    You said. You told the truth: that war is hell,
    But now the guns are still. Your task is done.

    The tales of glory that the old men spun
    You showed as lies - you broke their hateful spell.
    Glory's the lie war's cancer feeds upon.

    For all the dead, destroyed by gas or gun,
    Yours was the voice that questioned why they fell -
    but now the guns are still. Your task is done.

    War was the enemy, and not the Hun.
    No glorious combat: gangrene, gas and shell.
    Glory's the lie war's cancer feeds upon.

    The gun that spat your hasty orison
    Could never kill the bitter truth you tell,
    But now the guns are still. Your task is done:

    And when the final war on death is won,
    The unnumbered dead will have their passing-bell.
    Glory remains the lie war feeds upon,
    And other guns boom still: our task goes on.


    Qui Desiderat Pacem, Praeparat Bellum

    Safeguard virginity through fornication,
    Guarantee chastity by being a whore:
    Stockpile your weapons, bring peace to the nation:
    "If you want peace, you must prepare for war".


    Combat Training

    Remember, he is something less than man:
    He is a kraut, a terrorist, a jew.
    He'll try to rape your sister if he can:
    Remember, he is different from you.

    It isn't really murder, after all:
    It's best to think of it as just a kind
    Of cleansing operation: pest control.
    That makes it easier, I think you'll find.

    When duty calls, will you shrink back, afraid,
    Or stand up with your comrades, firm and strong?
    Go out and show the stuff of which you're made,
    And make your pledge "my country, right or wrong!"

    Ignore your conscience - soon you'll find you're willing
    To do what normally you would abhore.
    Demean the victim, euphemise the killing,
    Follow the crowd - remember, this is war!

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    Registered User SteveH's Avatar
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    Light verse

    Types of Poem I Don't Like

    Poems by Christians of the hand-waving tendency that are sentimental and theologically dubious.
    Poems that uncritically retail every fashionable idea and new bias.
    Poems whose rhyme and metre are a bit hit-and-miss.
    Poems I can't make head or tail of (quite a large category, this).
    Poems that could make perfect sense if only the poet tried a little harder.
    Poems that list the contents of the poet's larder.
    Poems about domestic life that casually let me know the poet's an intellectual.
    Poems about domestic life that complain that the poet's husband's ineffectual.
    Poems about writers I'm never likely to read a word of.
    Poems dedicated to people I've never heard of.
    Poems dedicated to people everybody's heard of, to show what important friends the poet's got.
    Poems that are furiously passionate on subjects about which sensible people care not one jot.
    Poems with a chip on their shoulder.
    Poems about getting older.
    Poems that are technically faultless but twee.
    All poems in magazines that never accept poems from me.


    Alexander Pope Rewrites 'Baa Baa Black Sheep'

    Stay, ebon scion of the wooly race,
    And prithee turn to me thy swarthy face;
    Exchange thy customary bleats for words
    (Though rhetorician's gifts in beastly herds
    Are very rarely found), and indicate
    Thy sable fleece's volume, and its fate.
    "Three bags of dusky filaments, quite full -
    One's Master Horsfall's,* which he means to pull
    Over the critics' visionary spheres,
    In hope t'avoid the censure which he fears
    (Just censure, vain attempt!) One's for the Dame
    (Though monarch's dubbings now bestow such fame
    On daughters of the merest artizan:
    All whom the democratick zephyrs fan).
    Behold: a youth, with gay career, has gone
    Down yonder rustic highway - he gets one:
    Which means, dear sir, I much regret to say,
    I haven't any left for you. Good day!"

    *i.e. me - Steve Horsfall.


    Robbie Burns Rewrites 'Hickory Dickory Dock'

    Waur art thou gangin, wee bit mousie?
    Thou ken'st a clock is nae a housie.
    I wad be laith to rin and bruise thee
    Wi' murderous broom,
    So off awa thou gangst and choose thee
    Some ither room.

    I ken I wrecked thy former hame
    Wi' my great pleuch: but a' the same
    I canna feel I was tae blame -
    I didna see thee;
    And after a', my grief and shame
    Led me to free thee.

    When yonder clock is striking ane
    The din will cause thee muckle pain,
    And then thou'lt rin back doun again
    Wi' bickering brattle.
    If noise can mak a mouse insane,
    Why, surely that'll!


    Gerard Manley Hopkins Rewrites 'Ding Dong Bell'

    As tumbled over rim in roundy well
    Cat mews: each hung bell's bow swung goes ding dong:
    Who tumbled kitty all the well's depth along?
    Young Johnny Green, the boy-next-door from hell.
    Stout lad, Tom Stout, hearing the warning bell,
    Rushed then. What then? Reached the green ferns among
    And dripping stones, and, with a merry song
    Upon his lips, pulled pussy out, pell-mell.

    Clipped round the ear for a nuisance he's to mend,
    Has Johnny learnt his lesson? Wild or tame,
    Cats don't go well in wells: instead, befriend
    A fleet-foot feline. All good folk exclaim
    When cats fall, gall themselves, at a well's end,
    Crying "What obnoxious flaming brat's to blame?"


    After Chesterton

    After the English drunkards made the rolling roads that they rode,
    The stupid English planners made the ghastly English A-road:
    But I gave thanks for bike paths built by those whose values differed
    The day I rode to Watlington by way of Crowmarsh Gifford.
    Last edited by SteveH; 05-20-2007 at 09:36 AM.

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    Registered User SteveH's Avatar
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    Poems about poetry

    The Definition of Poetry

    "The music of what happens" is what Seamus
    Heaney thinks poetry is all about,
    Which is as much help - none - as the more famous
    Wordsworthian definition - which, no doubt,
    You don't need me to quote. I've never found
    One that I thought was really satisfactory.
    Poetry is mercurial - won't be bound
    By dusty definitions. It's refractory.
    Its indefinability is what
    Defines it - and if that's a paradox,
    The muses, one and all, care not one jot,
    Delighting as they do in jolts and shocks.
    No lexicographer has yet come near it.
    The truth is this - you know it when you hear it.


    John Clare

    From the asylum, poor insane John Clare
    Looked back upon his life and wrote 'I am'.
    The unmeant blasphemy's ironic, for
    He felt cast down, not god-like, at the time.
    He wrote it twice - three stanzas, and one sonnet.
    The stanzas are more famous - but for me
    The other poem has such thoughts within it
    As make me start to understand just why
    He felt the cold, dead hand of time upon him
    Crushing his sense of who he was, and where.
    The fashionable types began to shun him -
    All but a few - and earth put out his fire.
    A heart of stone would melt at the sad, small
    Two words with which the sonnet ends: "that's all".


    For John Keats on his 200th birthday, 31st October 1995

    In 1820 you arrived in Rome
    Knowing within a year you would be dead.
    You could not look on letters sent from home:
    With you were buried Fanny Brawne's, unread.
    Your name was "writ in water", you believed:
    Those words, inscribed on your Italian grave
    Prove that your dying gloom had you deceived -
    For, John, your name grew to a tidal wave.

    Your fame's assured. Your name's writ in the heart
    Of all who love your "demon poesy";
    Your day, and all its sweets, are far from gone.
    This poor pastiche I'm writing is my part
    In thanking you. You've meant a lot to me,
    So, with my love, accept this sonnet, John.

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    Not politically correct Pendragon's Avatar
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    Nice sonnets! You need to enter the current form poetry contest! The current form is a sonnet of sorts, I won't ruin the surprise! Good sonnets doesn't even begin to describe yours though, and I write a lot of sonnets!
    Some of us laugh
    Some of us cry
    Some of us smoke
    Some of us lie
    But it's all just the way
    that we cope with our lives...

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    reed lewis allan's Avatar
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    not entirely on topic, but it made me think of this, and its interesting nonetheless. its by delmore schwartz:

    The riches of the poet are equal to his poetry
    His power is his left hand
    It is idle weak and precious
    His poverty is his wealth, a wealth which may destroy him
    like Midas Because it is that laziness which is a form of impatience
    And this he may be destroyed by the gold of the light
    which never was
    On land or sea.
    He may be drunken to death, draining the casks of excess
    That extreme form of success.
    He may suffer Narcissus' destiny
    Unable to live except with the image which is infatuation
    Love, blind, adoring, overflowing
    Unable to respond to anything which does not bring love
    quickly or immediately.

    ...The poet must be innocent and ignorant
    But he cannot be innocent since stupidity is not his strong
    point
    Therefore Cocteau said, "What would I not give
    To have the poems of my youth withdrawn from
    existence?
    I would give to Satan my immortal soul."
    This metaphor is wrong, for it is his immortal soul which
    he wished to redeem,
    Lifting it and sifting it, free and white, from the actuality of
    youth's banality, vulgarity,
    pomp and affectation of his early
    works of poetry.

    So too in the same way a Famous American Poet
    When fame at last had come to him sought out the fifty copies
    of his first book of poems which had been privately printed
    by himself at his own expense.
    He succeeded in securing 48 of the 50 copies, burned them
    And learned then how the last copies were extant,
    As the law of the land required, stashed away in the national capital,
    at the Library of Congress.
    Therefore he went to Washington, therefore he took out the last two
    copies
    Placed them in his pocket, planned to depart
    Only to be halted and apprehended. Since he was the author,
    Since they were his books and his property he was reproached
    But forgiven. But the two copies were taken away from him
    Thus setting a national precedent.

    For neither amnesty nor forgiveness is bestowed upon poets, poetry and poems,
    For William James, the lovable genius of Harvard
    spoke the terrifying truth: "Your friends may forget, God
    may forgive you, But the brain cells record
    your acts for the rest of eternity."
    What a terrifying thing to say!
    This is the endless doom, without remedy, of poetry.
    This is also the joy everlasting of poetry.
    (While you and i have lips and voices which
    are for kissing and to sing with
    who cares if some oneyed son for a bίtch
    invents an instrument to measure Spring with?

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    Not politically correct Pendragon's Avatar
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    I think these two lines say it all, and I laughed, and had to agree, as I have a drawer full of rejection slips myself!

    Poems that are technically faultless but twee.
    All poems in magazines that never accept poems from me.


    You rock!
    Some of us laugh
    Some of us cry
    Some of us smoke
    Some of us lie
    But it's all just the way
    that we cope with our lives...

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    Not politically correct Pendragon's Avatar
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    I really liked the villanelle. Very good.

    The others, I agree with the sediments, but they could be taken as "chip on the shoulder" or "preachey".
    Some of us laugh
    Some of us cry
    Some of us smoke
    Some of us lie
    But it's all just the way
    that we cope with our lives...

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    yes, that's me, your friendly Moderator 💚 Logos's Avatar
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    Sorry, topics merged, please see this topic:
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  9. #9
    Registered User SteveH's Avatar
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    Oops - sorry, Logos! Maybe I should've read the guidelines before posting.

    Thanks for the comments, Pendragon and Lewis, esp. Pen's very complimentary ones! Point taken about the preachiness of some of the anti-war ones.
    Last edited by SteveH; 05-22-2007 at 05:55 AM.

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