l i f e
the bottom of truth
contributions
christopher@30seconds.org
I don't.
You see I read some poems tonight, trying to remind myself how a proper sonnet is supposed to go. You know the lyrical poem. Single stanza. Fourteen lines. Intricate rhyme, but predictable iambic pentameter. I should've gone straight for the master. Mr. Shakespeare. I decided on Wilfred Owen.
Wilfred Owen was my age when he died one week before the end of World War I. He wrote wonderful sonnets. Somehow when I picked the book off the shelf I knew what I was getting into. What path I was leading myself down, but I went willingly. I read the words and thought my God would that he could've known...
But I think he did know he wasn't going to live. He wrote the following after walking through a group of Scottish troops, he was commenting on their expressions, "It was not despair, or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit's. It will never be painted, and no actor will ever seize it. And to describe it, I think I must go back and be with them."
He knew he was writing about something horrible. Something people didn't want to face. He chose the subject of war because he was there and he called it the "pity of war". He also said the poetry is in the pity, "All we can do is warn. That is why the true poets must be truthful."
I put his book down and wondered about another poet who was truthful, but never wanted to be published. Whose book I hold only because his brother saw fit to publish his works after he died. A poet who never titled any poem. And I connected one poem to Wilfred Owen and to me and to a great many others. I don't believe the poem anymore, but I used to. Wilfred Owen would have never believed it. It is the very opposite of what he was saying but I connect it to him be he never got the chance to condemn it. I connect it with myself because I never got the chance to understand fully what Wilfred Owen really meant. I connect it to others because it is true in the hearts of many human beings. It reads like an epitaph. It is not a sonnet. It is not pretty. Greasy finger prints mark this page so I guess I liked the poem a lot at one point in time. But enough...here it is. To Mr. Owen. To myself. And to you. If poets must be truthful, and this man was a poet, this is the bottom of truth...
XXXVI
Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.
goodnight 2.3.98
