Sonnet

[wpseo_breadcrumb]

If this sonnet is one of the worst you’ve ever read I apologise.  I think the premise is fine, but the execution is poor. When I wrote this in 2009 I was pleased with it but I now look back on it with the fondness of a father regarding his child, who is learning to walk.  This particular child never did learn to walk.  Poetry will never be my strong suit, but surely it’s the taking part that matters?

© adewils 26-Oct-2016

One of the first things I wrote in my first Creative Writing class, this poem was inspired by watching TV adverts showing shiny, happy people buying nice sofas, immediately followed by ‘Warzone’, a Channel 5 documentary series following the lives of British servicemen and women at Kandahar Airbase, Afghanistan. Amongst the team was a fire crew, who had put out a plane fire.  The juxtaposition of life in the UK and in Afghanistan was the catalyst for me.

Sonnet

How can it be that I can snuggle down
And be cauterised, then anaesthetised,
By two minute, idiotic, sales pitches
And situations turning comi to tragi?
All this only a matinee to the Main Event,
The Pay-Per-View war on Reality TV…
On the 47 inch plasma screen the sand
Burns in brown and yellow, orange then red.
In dayglo bibs, Essex boys douse the flames,
“Hell, that Harrier’ll never jump again!”
Inside, the bleached blond skeleton of the boy
Whose skin, desert winds will no more caress.
He’ll never push away the joystick
In Afghan skies and fly home, over Iran…