FOREVER MORE

by NICHOLAS HANCOCK

We crave eternity - But why?

It's simple: we don't want to die.

Against the Pyrenean snow

the sky's a lake of cobalt blue

through which a goshawk rows

with strokes that wing your back.

Your skis bite crusted snow.

Rooted, you lean to the slope

and watch the sailing bird.

Let me hold on to this, you pray,

let it never end.

Sky, wings and mountain crests,

pause in your flight,

an eternal beating over Val d'Arran.

But cobalt blue's a frequency -

a wavelength of four-seventy millimicrons rounded down - ,

which, if time stopped, would cease to be.

The goshawk's wing-beats would be stilled;

it would not even fall

but would congeal

against an unseen sky.

Your heart meanwhile would stop,

you'd not be here,

and nor would I.

We want to concentrate time in our fist -

Get wise!  Eternity does not exist.

                                              FLANDERS FIELD

                          In 1914,so I've heard tell ,the whole world went to war,

                        And at Pachendale and Dardanell,and many places more.

            The battle raged, and the big guns roared, and shells screamed to the sky.

                        And Kitchener and Haig called out for more and more to die. 

                    Harry and Fritz in Flanders field, with the blood red poppy fell,

                   And they thought it was for freedoms sake they tasted of this hell.

                  And they drove them on like cattle, in the slaughter house of death,

                  In the mud and blood of Flanders field, they gave their living breath.

                     But after the war was finished and the pain and ,the dying done,

          And the years rolled on, and the Flanders field was healed by the rain and sun,

                      The beautiful poppy of Flanders bloomed and blossomed again,

                          But soon it was mankind forgot, all of the killing and pain.

                                  And again in 1940,all mankind went of its head.

                    With the gassings down in Dachau, bombing children in their bed.

                        But it’s for the sake of freedom  war in Europe must be won,

                              Then we'll finish it in Hiroshima with an atom bomb.

                     But after the war was finished, and the pain and the dying done,

           And the years rolled on, and the Flanders field was healed by the rain and sun.

                     The beautiful poppy of Flanders bloomed and blossomed again,

                    But how soon it is mankind forgets, all of the killing and pain.

                          And it's once again we're threatened by the harbingers of war,

                            Will we listen? Will we answer? Will we open up the door?

                          Will we listen to their ratings and their lust for war and strife.

                            We must give the final answer, and the answer must be life.

                             For it's now that their preparing for the genocide of man.

                         For the death and the destruction that the first war just began.

                        And the lovely poppy fields of Flanders, they will bloom no more,

                                  If we start it, we'll not finish it, the Armageddon war  

Syd Leathwood

DANSE MACABRE

by

MIKE WHITELEY

The Cemetery slept silently

No breeze disturbed the air

The patchy cloud at times allowed

The moonlight's ghostly stare

To penetrate, illuminate

That sombre, silent scene

Then, through the gloom, I heard a tune

A fiddle played unseen

Time and again, a frantic strain

Re-echoed through the night

Drawn by the sound, from underground

The corpses stood upright

They raised their stones, with rattling bones

All dancing to the tune

First three or four, then more and more

Showed up against the moon

The churchyard, spread with dancing dead

Assumed an eerie tone

The dance went on 'til one by one

They sank beneath the stone

One last crescendo marked the end

The fiddle played no more

The ghastly sight had left the night

Just as it was before

It may have been a frightful dream

I stood and stared around

In every place but found no trace

Of footprints on the ground

The Cemetery slept silently

No breeze disturbed the air

No one but me was there to see

What I had witnessed there...