Remembrance Day: a haiku.
Meak versus the meek.
Now’s the time to remember
all our wars’ victims.
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© MPSO 11/11/2023
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Meak: Norse to mean a sword
TSAP Editors note:
A haiku is unrhymed, an ancient poem that usually adheres to a specific three-line, seventeen-syllable format. It originates in Japan and once formed an opening stanza to a larger work of poetry (a renga). In fact without such strict adherence a haiku would be considered a senryū.
Traditionally, a haiku depicts a moment in time and includes a kireji (a cutting word/s -although a literal meaning is cutting letter) that usefully creates a pause, a time to reflect – more powerful than our own ceasuara and a sense of closure and usually includes a kigo, a sense of season or nature.
Private
Thomas Highgate.
On the eleventh of the eleventh,
after Armistice Day is remembered,
I shall drink to the health of those lost,
and to the ‘Glorious Three hundred and Sixth.’
I will wonder why they were required to die:
taken to their stakes – oh the pith, oh the misery
of war but ‘Long live King George the Fifth!’ eh, that
they all blindly served, in a manmade, marmalade, hell.
Service to King and country, not seen as a chore.
To run towards the German’s Gatling gun, aimed at thee
or be shot by a British Enfield, bore three-oh-three.
But a Soldier’s Heart: shell shock, the surgeons ignored.
So private Tom became the first to bare our burden:
‘No pardon: it’s empire my son, a significant enterprise lesson,
so prepare to die and we’ll take away such angst and misery.’
Cheers! God bless you my dearest lad, ‘God save the King!’
Then followed three hundred and five more. Empire’s sons:
not shot by the damned Huns but by their own ruddy guns.
No thought of their loved ones waiting for news -found by
their home nation’s fires, set by Jerusalem’s smoking, chimney, hues.
So God bless you my dear, dear boy and hear’s to the
‘Glorious Three hundred and Sixth!’
First read by his father: 11th November 1920. The Cenotaph, in the presence of HM George V.
© MPSO 6.11.2023.
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