In Competition No. 2423 you were invited to write a poem in the voice of a fed-up soldier, of any country or date, far from home.
I was apprehensive that most of you would use this invitation to vent your feelings about the unhappy war in Iraq, but I was pleasantly surprised by the variety in time and space of your fractious servicemen (there was only one servicewoman) — a tribesman from the steppes bored in Rome, a redcoat on St Helena after Napoleon’s death, a conscript from Clerkenwell stuck in Wales during Edward I’s campaign, a French quartermaster in Egypt with Napoleon, a German soldier not enjoying Stalingrad…. The prizewinners, printed below, are awarded £25 each, and Keith Norman takes the bonus fiver. A happy new year to you all.
As a member of a hand-picked fighting force
You’ll find no keener man than me.
Yet here I am inside a bloody horse,
Bored stiff and bursting for a pee.
The Trojans were the bad guys, we the good:
The gods, they said, were on our side.
I fear we have to face the likelihood
That we’ve been taken for a ride.
I grant you that a fellow feels quite sore
When someone runs off with his wife.
But does that justify a ten-year war?
And is it worth one single life?
What brass-necked liar could be so thick-skinned
As still to claim our cause is just?
Is one who’d trade his daughter for a wind
The kind of guy a chap can trust?
Keith Norman
I long for old Cheapside, the tavern, the ale
And the merry, late-night revels,
Away from the wet and the ghostly wail
Of the wind on the Somerset levels;
Who’d be a Roundhead, chilled to the core,
With frozen, waterlogged feet,
Stuck in the sludge and slime on a moor
In a world of withies and peat?
And where are the Royalists? Nobody knows,
Nobody here, in the mire;
They’re probably sheltering, toasting their toes
In front of blazing fire;
Oh give me a tavern, a tankard, a song,
A meal and a maid and a romp,
Cheapside in London is where I belong,
Not here on this desolate swamp!
Alan Millard
The sand reaches right from here to the sky,
I’m in Iraq and I’m not sure why.
They’ve got super-weapons, said Mr Blair,
Only nobody’s found any anywhere.
I knew a Yank who thought Bush was right
Till a lot of his mates got blown up one night.
Eden was near here — God closed the joint,
I can’t help thinking He had a point.
There’s been fighting here since 1000 bc.
They didn’t need the Hittites and they don’t need me.
We’re supposed to bring democracy, we get no thanks,
Just their kids throwing rocks and stones at our tanks.
You can’t run away and you can’t even hide
From a nutter with a beltful of suicide.
They say what we need is an exit strategy.
Bye-bye Baghdad would be fine by me.
Brian Murdoch
Dear Mum, There’s not a lot to say.
I wish we weren’t so far away.
Nowhere to go, not much to do
But sit here and watch the mutton stew,
Yomp round the marshes in the rain,
And then it’s mutton stew again.
With only turnips, sheep and kale,
Blasted by snowstorms, sleet and hail,
Stanley’s a bleak and windswept place.
There’s just the monthly penguin race
Or a freak iceberg in the bay
To brighten up our dreary stay.
At last some action! I must go
On duty quick! Not Argies, no!
Some sheep to rescue from the rocks.
P.S. and thank you for the socks.
Shirley Curran
The galleon is turned and tossed.
Our water’s low; no food but tack.
The priests are sick, Don Pedro’s lost,
We’re driven north, there’s no way back.
King Philip’s men came, hard and mean,
And marched us off with many a prod
To sail the sea we’d never seen
And fight the enemies of God.
At home, where skies are never grey,
We’d tend the grapes and drink the wine.
The enemies of God, I’d say,
Were never enemies of mine.
Some say the earth is round, but I
Could never see how that might be.
And now strange lights are in the sky:
Mother of God, remember me.
Noel Petty
We go climbing up each time as my grand-dad used to climb
In the days before the ending of the Raj,
Till a tribesman takes a shot — though he misses quite a lot:
He’s a rotten sort of marksman, by and large.
At the top we set a picket as a groundsman lays a wicket
And we wait in deadly boredom for a raider.
I think I’m going gaga: it’s like sitting in an Aga
With the added risk of death by al-Qa’eda.
When his grand-dad was a stripling, it was like you read in Kipling,
With the British acting as we do today,
Playing out our endless part from the Khyber to Herat.
Now it’s time they wrote another sort of play!
Paul Griffin
No. 2426: Horatian
You are invited to supply a poetic invitation from one friend to another to come and stay in the country and enjoy its pleasures. Maximum of 16 lines. Entries to ‘Competition No. 2426’ by 12 January.
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