We were a generation never called to War,
because we had bugger-all worth fighting for.
We felt no worse pain than existential angst,
so held sweet FA to be sacrosanct.
For all us peacetime poets without a cause,
there were no white feathers to give us pause.
Our countries were not imagined lines on a map,
but psycho-sexual landscapes and all that Freudian crap.
We left no comrades behind to rot on barbed wire
and a barbecue on Sunday was our only friendly fire.
Any poppies that grew were not signs of hope,
but a cash crop of seeds to be sold as dope.
There were no atheists in foxholes, only anarchists
and arseholes and fucked-up buddhists.
It was forever England, in a foreign field,
where empty beer bottles and crisp bags were concealed.
Comments
Richard L. Prov... | February 5, 2008 - 16:31
Wow! This poem is full of zing and zang. Quite creative. My father spent two years in England under the banner of the Canadian Air Force. He said it was tough having to keep moving their HQ during the Battle of Britain. He said, "War is awful," since his job was to help direct a thousand bombers at a time to "bomb" enemy factories. I am very proud of the four years he spent in WW 11, helping provide freedoms for our society today. RLP
tcook | February 7, 2008 - 14:29
Those who fought or are fighting in Korea, Aden, Kenya, the Falklands, Iraq or Afghanistan (to name but some) might feel a tad aggrieved by this. And are you really saying that without war we become lost as a society?
Good aggressive stuff though!
markbrown | February 7, 2008 - 15:20
"We left no comrades behind to rot on barbed wire
and a barbecue on Sunday was our only friendly fire."
There's at least one too many syllables in the second line.
"There were no atheists in foxholes, only anarchists
and arseholes and fucked-up buddhists."
Anarchist doesn't rhyme with Buddhist, which it should following your scheme.
I can't help that this is poem where the chosen form undoes or works against the intended meaning.
Cheers,
Mark
markbrown | February 7, 2008 - 15:24
And thinking about it, wouldn't it work better if it were modelled on the poem that it references?
http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen2.html
Cheers,
Mark
WilkyBarKid | February 7, 2008 - 23:03
Thanks for your thoughts about this.
The form is quite deliberate. Simple rhyming couplets with an inconsistent metre that doesn't quite work. It's meant to read like a very amateur poem, roughly thrown together.
The voice in this poem is that of an unreliable narrator. I was trying to convey something of the moral ambiguity (or even bankruptcy) of some members of my generation.
What inspired it was reading a book of critiques of poetic movements of the 20th Century, which suggested quite strongly that the War Poets of the First World War cast a long shadow over everything that preceded and followed them.
What shaped it was reading (and writing) an awful lot of bad poetry, safe and smug in the knowledge that I'm not likely to be shot or blown up.
markbrown | February 8, 2008 - 00:50
Ha!
It does d what you intended, though I have to admit the intention passed me by entirely.
Unless you know how good someone is, it can be difficult to pick up when their bad poetry about bad poetry isn't just bad poetry.
I suppose reading this in isolation didn't give me a chance to guess at motive or intention.
Cheers,
Mark
blackjack-davey | February 9, 2008 - 23:23
Likewise I didn't clock it was an unreliable narrator, just some bitter, burned out hipster reflecting that the festival's over. I liked this. A writer engaging with politics and meaning as opposed to the often self-referential maunderings of superior bed-ridden souls. Who cares about what they do in cafes or their attempts to out-rhyme each other? Who cares about their endless sensitivity to their own doomed selves?
The first stanzas are great but whatever your motive you've got to tighten up the last two (even if it's the voice of a naive rebel). Better scansion and you'll ram home meaning better than a police baton at Greenham.
'psycho-sexual landscapes and all that Freudian crap...' Don't you think 'other' would be better than all that?
This is engaging and lives on! But please tweak it.