LPiA-24 Nov. 11

[Tiger the Lion]

Let's Pretend it's April - Nov. 11
Rules: Write a poem for LPiA on the topic or form described. Each poem should appear as a New Reply to this thread. The goal is to, at the end of the month, have written 30 poems for the month of November. (or one, or six, or fifteen) Prompts may be revisited at any time. All members are welcome.

Topic : Write a poem inspired by a war story or war movie.
Form : appropriate to subject. 
Line requirements: 6,8,10,12... something regimented

Feel free to reply with comments or kudos as you wish. 

Questions?

[CRNDLSM]

It's time to ban abortions
Each abortion is murder
But we don't have to stop there
Well have to ban self defense,
The death penalty, and more
While we're at it let's ban war
Accidental incidents
And all the other ways we kill each other

[dukealien]

Their Best


War movies, as a genre, are the best
that they can be when they stress unity
of purpose in among the friendly men
with minor conflicts.  Good enough, but then
there is off-putting tendency to make
the enemy a faceless race or take
them all for sneering, loutish, lazy fools
who always miss their first shot.  These are tools
of half-baked drama.  Better far to play
them tragic, human, death the price they pay
no less than our boys: flawed on either side
but mostly soldiers we can watch with pride.

[busker]

1941

My father at 90,
talking about his favourite uncle:
only son, no children, widow,
parents.
Friends
in a foreign field.

[RiverNotch]

Secondo Matteo


Italian Neorealists developed their style
in the face of the devastation that Mussolini wrought
not only on his country, but on all the world,

with their cinéma vérité shots, their abrupt editing,
and their casting of randoms from the street
for major roles, although Pasolini,

known before his foray into film
first for his poetry then for his politics
then for his dubious relationship with boys,

broke from this orthodoxy when he cast
his friends, all fellow intellectuals,
as apostles, his mother as the Virgin,

though none of them -- fair enough -- were actors
in the professional sense. And so this portrait
of our Lord for the silver screen,

still the greatest of its kind,
one could also rightly call
a film shaped by war, a film about war,

just as the spiritual man, by nature,
always lives through war.

[CRNDLSM]

The last two lines clenched it for me, keeper

Secondo Matteo


Italian Neorealists developed their style
in the face of the devastation that Mussolini wrought
not only on his country, but on all the world,

with their cinéma vérité shots, their abrupt editing,
and their casting of randoms from the street
for major roles, although Pasolini,

known before his foray into film
first for his poetry then for his politics
then for his dubious relationship with boys,

broke from this orthodoxy when he cast
his friends, all fellow intellectuals,
as apostles, his mother as the Virgin,

though none of them -- fair enough -- were actors
in the professional sense. And so this portrait
of our Lord for the silver screen,

still the greatest of its kind,
one could also rightly call
a film shaped by war, a film about war,

just as the spiritual man, by nature,
always lives through war.

[Magpie]

Granda was a dispatch rider during the war.
A Roman Catholic in Rome,
Heaven through the gates of Hell.

He only ever told one story
-- coming home, December '45.
Men packed tightly onto a Lancaster Bomber,
him at the front; lying on the glass nose.
A bird making his way back to the nest.

[Valerie Please]

Powerball

They laid Margaret to rest 
next to Arthur. 
The bride he could claim
thanks to the atomic bomb.

In North Africa 1941
no joy for Yankee soldiers
Their green-leaf souls
sucked desert dry
(along with their tanks.)

Surviving that, he was
off to wet Italian hills.
Unquenchable socks
dissolved his toenails
into fertilizer for olive trees.

"Honshu: get ready to go
and never come home. 
The red circumference of pride
will burn up all of our boys."

But instead:
Two mushroom suns
erased
a quarter million faces.

Arthur came home 
and planted seeds 
from debts that were
impossible to pay.
In the end, his mind
left his corpse vacated. 

We gathered round and
paid our respects
tossing dirt like alms
into that deep well of charity
that was his grave.

He was finally reclaimed 
by dust seventy years after
his number came up.