Public Poetry

[tricia_stewart]

Hi everybody, ahhh..March, doesn't the very sound of the month make you want to crawl into bed and hide under the covers until it's over? It is the bringer of sooo much stress, not to mention fun illnesses that just add to the black hole that the stress has created in your head. As you can probably tell, I've still got the stupid flu. But it is not

Comments

[meag_o]

haha! Aw, you're not spiteful. :) I know what you mean, my dad gets a little agravated everytime I yell "send them home!" in the middle of news telecasts.

I hope you are on the upward slope to recovery my dear! Just think, right now we're battling the assignment mountain, but it's only 26 days until spring. :)

[ofcatslives]

Great points Tricia,

Both poems you mentioned are disturbing in their owns rights as you have outlined above. My grandfather-in-law (not quite through marriage but long-term relationship, that counts, right?) fought in WWII and isn't the same person he was before. Although he survived the war, he has lived for all the years afterward in a state of emotional death. I have only ever known him this way and it is terribly sad, especially now that he has an incurable form of cancer and will never live to see any appreciation from the general public for what he has sacrificed. Knowing him has reminded me of what it means to be a Canadian and to be proud of all we have in this great country.

Janice

[may_posa1]

Since everyone is getting into their back-store history I figure I'll partake as well. I am a mutt. My father's side is British and Scotish, my mother's is European, her mother was Polish and her father was a Yugo, yeah I can say Yugo because I am as well. My Opi (the Yugo) fought against the Germans in WWII and ended up going to a concentration camp. I remember always looking at his arm tattoo of when they marked him. He past away last year and the ripe old age of 85, he had outlasted all my other grandparents, he was a survivor to the end. Now I dont know anyone who fought in the First World war who is connected to me blood wise. Anyways there is a bit about me and my ties to war, on to reading the next posts.
-Lesley-Anne

[listen_to_teeth]

That part of the poem you wrote out reminds me of Fahrenheight 9/11 when they show the clip of the soldiers in Iraq and how they play that song (I think it's that Bloodhound Gang song that goes: "Burn motherfucker burn") when they're going around the city and shooting people. It is so disturbing - to make it seem like a game. But I guess that's the horror of it.

[roger_kuin]

As for Vitaï Lampada, it's not that war is a game or a game is war; in Newbolt's time there was a sense that sports were a way of instilling certain values that later stood one in good stead if one was in a war. Such things as: courage, standing by comrades, team-work, self-sacrifice. This is mainly what the Newbolt poem is about. The game (cricket in this case) is 'just' a game; war is deadly and serious. But the values you learn at school (a boarding school) will determine how you react in critical situations in later life.