One hand. No other to clasp in prayer At the start of each days mourning. All he had when he was wheeled in– For good.
For good he was told, “Pro aris et focis!” Go for glory, for god and gold! -Yet, here he lies more restrained- Than the oldest of old. For good, I will tell him He won’t be mobile. As soon as he climbs From poppy visions into nightmares. Shock into shock.
“I sure hope he doesn’t have a love,” was the somber song of the nurses. Hardened by the war, their hearts were clotting wounds. Around the corridor, they gave what little pity They’d left to dole.
I’ve never written a poem before. I’m gonna go ahead and apologize for my complete absence of form and well crafted meter. I modeled this poem as a poetic response to Wilfred Owen’s poem entitled “Disabled.” What I attempted to do here was to remodel the poem to the perspective of a WWI nurse that witnesses the speaker of Owen’s poem being freshly wheeled into the hospital. I tried to create an outside perspective of the speaker of Owen’s poem to help create a kind of subjective tension between what the speaker in “Disabled” thinks of his position and what an outsider thinks about his situation. I picked a female speaker due to Owen’s focus on women and how the speaker feels they feel toward him. I more specifically picked a nurse as she would be one of the more sympathetic speakers for a war victim. Hope you enjoy it.
I think this is an excellent response to disabled–one that captures the other side with nearly as much depressed, numb sadness as Owen’s original. I also like how you recycle bits from other poems–using that militaristic Latin phrase (for god and country) as you voice the nation’s jingoistic optimism in sarcastic relief. And though you don’t follow Owen’s pattern, which is extraordinarily distinct in the “disabled” rhyme scheme he offers, our own form seems rather blasted and fragmentary in as way that is not unfitting. Great work.