dVerse Poetics

by rugby843, posted in Uncategorized

Your challenge today is to read three poems by dead poets and respond to ONE of them in your own way. I chose:

When I’m among a Blaze of Lights

When I’m among a blaze of lights, 

With tawdry music and cigars 

And women dawdling through delights, 

And officers in cocktail bars, 

Sometimes I think of garden nights 

And elm trees nodding at the stars. 

I dream of a small firelit room 

With yellow candles burning straight, 

And glowing pictures in the gloom, 

And kindly books that hold me late. 

Of things like these I choose to think 

When I can never be alone: 

Then someone says ‘Another drink?’ 

And turns my living heart to stone.

***

Missing home, sadness creeps. Uncertainty looms in surroundings, masking fear of what lies ahead when once again called to board a truck full of mates, traveling to another battlefield.

Bright lights and liquored drink dull thoughts of future horrors and horrors left behind.

***

http://dversepoets.com/2023/10/03/poetics-dead-poets-society/

13 thoughts on “dVerse Poetics”

  4. Your response to the Sassoon poem was different to the others I’ve read for this prompt, Cheryl. I like the way you focus on the emotions and the horror of war in the first stanza of your prose poem and then escape to the ‘bright lights and liquored drink’ to ‘dull thoughts of future horrors and horrors left behind’. We can’t really know what soldiers went through in WW1 but poets like Sassoon really knew how to show us in their words.

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