3C (Year 9)
Crossing the Line
We stand beneath the solemn sky,
the clear blue sky
that beautiful sky,
flea-ridden, trench-hidden,
shaking.
Fear
like a mephitic fog,
seeping into our hearts
and hurling itself against
our woefully inadequate wall of bravery.
We stand beneath this oh-so-mocking sky
and wait.
We wait the day away
and the sky takes on the colour
of the ubiquitous battery smoke.
Then,
we are rushed away
to the front line,
again,
and we watch the other platoons stumble back,
fearful,
shell-shocked,
half-sized,
again.
And only then the order comes;
"Charge for your country,
for your freedom, or death!"
And we shudder and shake,
and quiver and quake,
a pause, a beat,
then charge.
Flashbacks,
a wife at home,
children,
my very own family,
how sorrowful it is
to leave my heart with them
and venture forth into
this god-forsaken territory,
two years now, or three?
A warm blanket of emotion smothers me
before I cast it out
and coldly acknowledge that
the only thing planned ahead for me
is victory
or defeat.
For me, or for them.
Flurries of bullets rent the air,
Screams,
Shouts,
Thunder,
as fears take essence
on the grey soils of France,
stained with the memories
of Britons and Germans alike.
Horror enough
to raise the question of sanity,
Our leader's sanity,
Their leader's sanity,
God's sanity,
Lucifer's insanity.
Naught but Hecate
could weave a world of sorrow
so frightening, so unjust,
with such precarious morality;
so ghastly
that one man's actions
have power enough
to condemn us all.
Streaked with blood and worse,
stumbling
over barely human forms
both alive and dead.
Wandering blindly through this
sea of sorrow,
this deep of despair,
this peak of injustice and fear.
I stop,
crouch,
a hiatus in the fighting,
then a bang.
I turn,
a man,
not ours,
obviously past life’s true inevitability.
I raise my gun.
I pull.
His misery ends.
How?
How can Hell exist
when our world is there already?
Happiness is just a nine letter word,
lonely in the midst of the negatives.
Man need not
this insatiable lust for war,
and realisation strikes
as I realise escape is near.
I stare at the rifle in my hands
mournfully.
I sigh with the earth
at the cruelty of man
and Nature's lost battle.
Whether the battle is lost or won,
we have lost the war.
Escape,
family,
fear,
sanity ambiguous.
Who cares?
Not I
And not Him either.
We all die eventually,
Man's fundamental flaw,
I raise my weapon to my trembling temples,
I understand now.
I pull.
Blackout.
A Haiku Haiku
Haikus are quite short,
They can be about all things,
Example given.
Comments (1)
Michael Hughes said
at 10:08 pm on Jan 3, 2013
Done well; well done.
You don't have permission to comment on this page.