The Soldiers at Lauro -- Spike Milligan

Guest poem submitted by Siddhartha Joshi:

(Poem #831) The Soldiers at Lauro Young are our dead Like babies they lie The wombs they blest once Not healed dry And yet - too soon Into each space A cold earth falls On colder face. Quite still they lie These fresh-cut reeds Clutched in earth Like winter seeds But they will not bloom When called by spring To burst with leaf And blossoming They sleep on In silent dust As crosses rot And helmets rust. -- Spike Milligan

Spike has a magical way with words. The ability to make a poem seem absurdly
simple to compose when it is anything but - unless you are blessed with the
skill - is very rare indeed. In "...Lauro" he captures the choked poignancy
of the moment of burying the dead deftly and with great economy of words. He
manages, at the same time to convey his silent, sad, hopeless anger at the
utter stupidity of war and it abbreviation of a life already too brief.

Siddhartha.

[Minstrels Links]

A very different sort of poem by Milligan is the light-hearted "Teeth",
Poem #701 on the Minstrels. There's a biography accompanying it.