Strike
Working himself into a frenzied state,
He called up his fiancée on the phone.
Excited, in a quite alarming way,
Imagining the bed on which she lay,
He cried out, in a strange, mesmeric tone:
‘Be with you soon, my love; won’t be too late!’
Within this sub-plot, this domestic scene,
Lurked one more exploit under his control:
A schoolyard hit, precisely as a pin,
A hundred children’s bodies which begin
To rot, with each departure of their soul;
All shaken out in numbers on his screen.
His shift now done, he made another call:
‘Coming, my love. Didn’t take long at all.’
Stephen Gospage
Tue 17th Mar 2026 18:47
Thank you for your comments, Graham and John, and thank you for you very helpful suggestions, Freda. I always appreciate feedback on the style and structure of a poem and will try to revise it on the basis of the points you make. Thank you very much.
The object of this poem was to point out how the violence of war becomes banal and subsumed by the everyday priorities of normal life, particularly when war is being conducted anonymously by people a long way away. You can imagine that someone firing missiles might also be preoccupied with picking up their children or doing the weekly shop. The scene described in the poem is awful, of course, but that was the point I was trying to make.
And thanks to those who liked this.