Child Soldier
I am but one.
One lost in the midst of 11,000
who share my plight,
Who share the burden of the long nights and the endless days
Of gunfire and carnage,
Of no one to turn to, no one to rely on.
A lost generation in the midst of a war.
A war that leaves no winners but only losers,
Scarred and riddled with holes
With the images of death
heavy in our eyes
Heavy in our hearts.
But who will notice?
Who will notice as we struggle
Under the load of guns we are too little to carry
Fragile shoulders bending
under the weights of memories
Taken from families who are ancient history
From villages that are now erased from this earth.
Our past reduced to a few pieces of rubble
in an empty landscape
We are the personification of the word tragedy.
And every night as we fall asleep
We gaze on the dusty, bloodred sky
painted with the colors of our sorrow and our loss
And wish upon the faded stars
that one day
We’ll return home.
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I like your usage of questions, because it creates a feeling of unease and realization that no one is coming to solve their problems. Along with this, my favorite line definitely had to be "But who will notice?"
ReplyDeleteYour poem really caught my eye right away with the first couple of lines when you talked about how you were just one in thousands of people, really showing how you felt and how you were able to emphasize and amplify that. My favorite line from your poem was definitely, "We are the personification of the word tragedy."I was really able to connect to when you were talking about who would notice someone individually being that we are just one person in so many.
ReplyDeleteI really like the sensory detail in your poem. I felt like I was in the life of a child soldier when reading your lies. Your final line of "we'll return home" invokes a sense of hope in a negative environment. This poem really speaks of the issue of child soldiers in Africa.
ReplyDeleteI really like the connections and metaphors you say throughout your poem and how you relate that to a much larger scale of tragedy. I also really like the use of enjambment because it impacts the reader in all the right places. My favorite part was,
ReplyDelete"A lost generation in the midst of a war.
A war that leaves no winners but only losers,"
I enjoyed the overall message of your poem and how it does a great job of introducing and developing the controversial topic of child soldiers. You greatly enhanced your message through stanzas especially when you isolated the line "We are the personification of the word tragedy". All in all, my favorite line was "A war that leaves no winners but only losers" because it encompasses how the practice of using child soldiers has no positive outcomes, only devastation.
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