What is Ghost Story II?
Following on from Ghost Story, but which can also be read by itself here, Ghost Story II tells the story of the second meeting between a young man, Andy who meets again a young ghost / girl called Michelle who following on from the events of Ghost Story comes back to warn him of a very different kind of madness which is about to haunt his life.
Taunt and gothic, this will be a story which will be wrote in April 2015 (with maybe a poem or two beforehand as a sample) which will made you shiver and hopefully want to return to again and again as the poems fly in thick and fast like short chapters from a book all told within the boundaries of Napwrimo.
Within such a scale of story, it would prove interesting I thought to open up the story to see if other people would like to either include some of their own ghost poems or if they are feeling brave, submit a piece perhaps from a different angle in the story.
Contact me on aen1mpo@yahoo.co.uk for more details or through facebook (https://www.facebook.com/andynwriter).
A CENTENARY WAR POEM
ReplyDeleteFor Bill Baine, 1899-1968
1/15th Battalion, London Regiment , soldier number 535068
‘What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.’
And so some lines to spike centenary prattle:
These words a sole survivor soldier’s son’s.
My father Bill, born in Victorian England:
The sixth of January, 1899.
His stock, loyal London. Proletarian doff-cap.
Aged seventeen, he went to join the line.
Not in a war to end all wars forever
Just in a ghastly slaughter at the Somme -
A pointless feud, a royal family squabble
Fought by their proxy poor with gun and bomb.
My father saved. Pyrexia, unknown origin.
Front line battalion: he lay sick in bed.
His comrades formed their line, then came the whistle
And then the news that every one was dead.
In later life a polished comic poet
No words to us expressed that awful fear
Although we knew such things were not forgotten.
He dreamed Sassoon: he wrote Belloc and Lear.
When I was ten he died, but I remember,
Although just once, he’d hinted at the truth.
He put down Henry King and Jabberwocky
And read me Owen’s ‘Anthem For Doomed Youth’.
‘What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.’
And so some lines to spike Gove’s mindless prattle:
These words a sole survivor soldier’s son’s.
ATS/JB
22nd January 2014