So how could I respond to an Open Call about music and songs without writing endlessly about it for the rest of my life? Impossible. Then I re-read the call and realised I could select a poem. This was still just as challenging really. I’ve always loved poetry. Again, it’s the beat and the rhythm that draws me in, but with poetry you are forced to hear the words. Even if those words are nonsensical until you sit down and dissect the rhythm you hear them, you feel them.

However, the more I thought about all of the poems that have touched my soul the more I thought about the first poem that really moved me, that bought me to tears in front of my class mates at 15 years old. It was my first brush with such powerful literature, and it changed my life. Up until the semester we tackled the poets of World War One literature had all been purely about fiction and fantasy for me. It was only after hearing my teacher read Wilfred Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est that I really began to understand that literature, fact or fiction, was merely a channel for reality. A reality that is often too horrid to simple speak about. The reality that still goes on today despite Wilfred Owen’s (and other’s) powerful words. Men and women all over the world, no matter their religion, creed, political leaning or leadership are being told the same old lie – Dolce et decorum est pro patria mori; It is glorious and honourable to die for one’s country.

Wilfred Owen

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.