My Poetry Library

We are fast approaching that time of year when, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, we remember the fallen in (as well as those affected by) the many wars and conflicts from World War 1 onwards.  Also, next year is a particularly important centenary of the start of that first world war, which was an unmitigated disaster and tragedy for human life, aside from being a complete and utter failure in military tactics and strategy by the hapless leadership of the time.

This may not be the first time that poets have railed against war and it won’t be the last, but it is important that poets, as well as every other thinking person in the world, keep on doing so.

Please, therefore, can I invite you to unite with us on Into the Bardo next week for Poets Against War, which is really saying Poets for Peace. 

We will start with something special on Sunday (it may or may not include a poem, Terri Stewart will surprise us) and then each of the next six days we’ll host poems from six different poets.  Throughout the week, we’d like you to join us – not only as readers – but as writers by putting links to your own anti-war or pro-peace poems in the comment section on Into the Bardo. We’ll gather the links together in one post and put them up as a single special page. Please don’t worry about questions like whether you’ve been published or whether you think the work is good. These questions are irrelevant. It’s your heart in the work that counts. That’s where the power is.   So please unite with us in this one thing. Let’s put that energy out into the world. If you are so inclined, please also reblog this post and help us get the word out about our week of Poets Against War.

Thank you! ♥

In response to Victoria Slotto‘s challenge over on ‘Into The Bardo‘ yesterday, my mind fell to both ekphrasis and response poems, both of which I have done, on more than one occasion, particularly ekphrasis in collaboration with my Grass Roots Poetry Group friends, one such example of which is here.

However, at this time of year my mind begins to wander towards war and our remembrance of those, who were mortally, physically or mentally affected by them; and we are not far away, next year, from having to remember the beginning of a war that should have ended all wars, World War One, on its centenary.  Lord knows, I’ve written enough poems about war, but one comparatively recent conflict that I wrote about, was the Falklands War: ‘Twenty Nine“, which paid deference to the poetic form of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s epic elegy for a friend “In Memoriam A.H.H.”.  It was this elegy that I used in my attempt to write a Cento, a form of poetry inspired by Samuel Peralta over at dVerse Poets Pub ‘Form for All’, in which Samuel writes brilliantly about this form as “Collage and the Art of the Cento“. It gave rise to “Too Young to Die“

This resulting poem has ten stanzas, three of which (stanzas 2, 6 and 7) came from my poem, “Twenty Nine”, the other seven from Tennyson’s. Apart from using, albeit a very small part of Tennyson’s poem, I felt my adjustment of the metre to Tennyson’s tetrameter (compared to my original pentameter in “Twenty Nine”) pays deference, if not allusively, to the great man and his amazing elegy.  So, whilst this is not as much literary allusion as the ekphrastic example I’ve given a link to above, there is an element of allusion in recognition of Tennyson’s work.  So apologies to Victoria, if this is slightly ‘off piste’, but it struck me as appropriate, nonetheless.  If it alludes to anything, it does so to the huge pain that Tennyson obviously felt for his lost young friend that caused him to slave over his poem for seventeen years before he completed and published it; this is the same pain we can feel in grief.

Too Young To Die 

Forgive these wild and wandering cries,
Confusions of a wasted youth;
Forgive them where they fail in truth,
And in your wisdom make me wise.

Remember this, that we shall ever
Bow our heads and fill with tears
Life’s cup of mercy; recall what sears
The heart, not dim their great endeavour.

Something it is which you have lost,
Some pleasure from your early years.
Break, you deep vase of chilling tears,
That grief has shaken into frost!

That loss is common would not make
My own less bitter, rather more:
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break.

Old Yew, which grasping at the stones
That name the under-lying dead,
Your fibres net the dreamless head,
Your roots are wrapped about the bones.

Whose stolen duty marked by stope
For graves, but far too little memory
Of their names, rough cut in grey,
But for one, they leave us hope

That every day we take their lead
That we may see the need for us
To find a little courage, not fuss
On things that threaten not our needs.

O living will that shall endure
When all that seems shall suffer shock,
Rise in the spiritual rock,
Flow through our deeds and make them pure,

With faith that comes of self-control,
The truths that never can be proved
Until we close with all we loved,
And all we flow from, soul in soul.

Whereof the man, that with me trod
This planet, was a noble type
Appearing when the time was ripe,
That friend of mine who lives in God.

HEADS-UP: Tomorrow is U.N. International Peace Day … join the Global Synchronized Meditation.

My follow up article on the original one I wrote for “Into The Bardo” is Here

It’s a little shorter!

Enjoy and don’t forget to give me your thoughts.

Each time it comes around I search for words,
for what is just one day in every year,
that reveals itself in several iterations:
some bring celebration, some a tear;

some can bring together lasting friends
and then surprise you when you feel them sway
your otherwise unshaken disposition;
then some will come like any other day

and make you feel you sort of wish there would
be someone, who could make it otherwise;
bring you flowers, take you somewhere special,
for a picnic with some birds and butterflies.

Perhaps they will prepare a special meal,
the one you always relish, come what may;
command your sense of duty take a rest,
allow you to indulge yourself all day.

But, come the day, when someone says I love you
and brings a cup of tea for you in bed
and says this is your day, do as you will
doesn’t this mean just as much instead?

© 2013 John Anstie