5 Best Quotes for Each Poem Flashcards
Emigree
There once was a country… I left it as a child / but my memory of it is sunlight clear
It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants, / but I am branded by an impression of sunlight.
That child’s vocabulary I carried here / like a hollow doll, opens and spills a grammar.
It lies down in front of me, docile as paper; / I comb its hair and love its shining eyes.
My city hides behind me. They mutter death, / and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight.
No rhyme
8 line 8 line 9 line
Kamikaze
Her father embarked at sunrise / with a flask of water, a samurai sword
like a huge flag waved first one way / then the other in a figure of eight
a tuna, the dark prince, muscular, dangerous
we children still chattered and laughed // till gradually we too learned to be silent,
he must have wondered / which had been the better way to die.
Poppies
spasms of paper red, disrupting a blockade / of yellow bias binding around your blazer.
blackthorns of your hair. All my word / flattened, rolled, turned into felt, // slowly melting.
world overflowing / like a treasure chest.
your bedroom, / released a song bird from its cage.
dove pulled freely against the sky
Exposure
Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us…
Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army / Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey,
So we drowse, sun-dozed, littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses.
we lie out here, therefore were born, / For love of God seems dying.
All their eyes are ice, / But nothing happens.
Para-rhyme - unsettling
5 line stanza
Repetition of “but nothing happens”
Bayonet Charge
Suddenly he awoke and was running - raw / in raw-seamed hot khaki
Bullets smacking the belly out of the air
cold clockwork of the stars and the nations
Threw up a yellow hare that rolled like a flame
King, honour, human dignity, etcetera / Dropped like luxuries
Storm on the Island
Storm on the Island
Remains
On another occasion, we got sent out
