War
The Charge of the Light Brigade
The soldiers fought in the Battle of Balaclava, during the Crimean War:
- ‘ “Charge for the guns!” he said.’
- ‘ “Forward, the Light Brigade!” ’
- ‘Someone had blunder’d’
- ‘Theirs not to make reply… but to do and die’
- ‘Boldly they rode and well’
- ‘O the wild charge they made!’
Exposure
Propaganda spread lies about the experience that soldiers faced, the weather often took the lives of the soldiers over the actual conflict itself:
- Merciless iced east winds that knife us…’
- Low drooping flares confuse our memory’
- ‘But nothing happens’
- ‘Northward incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles’
- ‘We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy’
- _‘For love of God seems dying’ _
- ‘The burying-party, picks and shovels in their shaking grasp’
- ‘All their eyes are ice’
Bayonet Charge
The soldier is caught in the action of war and is questioning why he is fighting:
- ‘Suddenly he awoke and was running- raw”
- ‘Stumbling across a field of clods’
- ‘The patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye’
- ‘He plunged past with his bayonet toward the green hedge’
- ‘King, honour, human dignity, etcetera dropped like luxuries’
Remains
The soldiers are performing their duty to protect the war-torn area. The conflict continues in the soldier’s head, even when he returns home:
- ‘we got sent out’
- ‘Well myself and somebody else and somebody else are all of the same mind’
- ‘Three of a kind all letting fly’
- ‘I see every round as it rips through his life’
- ‘His blood-shadow stays on the street’
- ‘he’s here in my head when I close my eyes dug in behind enemy lines’
Poppies
The mother remembers her last experiences with her son, before he went off to war:
- ‘steeled the softening of my face’
- _ ‘A split second and you were away, intoxicated.’_
- ‘skirting the church yard walls’
- ‘I traced the inscriptions on the war memorial’
War Photographer
The photographer captures distressing moments that are experienced in war-zones. There is disjunction between the Western perception of conflict and the reality of conflict:
- ‘spools of sufferings set out in ordered rows’
- ‘He has a job to do.’
- ‘his editor will pick out five or six for Sunday’s supplement
- ‘reader’s eyeballs prick with tears’
- ‘where he earns his living… they do not care.’
The Emigree
The speaker’s childhood memories of her country of origin are being tainted by her adult understandings:
- ‘There once was a country… I left it as a child’
- ‘The worst news I receive of it cannot break my original view’
- ‘It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants’
- ‘I have no passport, there’s no way back at all’
- ‘They accuse me of being dark in their free city.’
Kamikaze
The government had power over the Kamikaze pilots and coaxed them into performing suicide missions:
- ‘Her father embarked at sunrise’
- ‘samurai sword’
- ‘a shaven head of full of powerful incantations’
- ‘journey into history’