National Poetry Day

https://nationalpoetryday.co.uk/poems/change-poems/

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Christ and the Soldier by Siegfried Sassoon (1916)

I The straggled soldier halted -- stared at Him -- Then clumsily dumped down upon his knees, Gasping "O blessed crucifix, I'm beat !" And Christ, still sentried by the seraphim, Near the front-line, between two splintered trees, Spoke him: "My son, behold these hands and feet." The soldier eyed him upward, limb by limb, Paused at the Face, then muttered, "Wounds like these Would shift a bloke to Blighty just a treat !" Christ, gazing downward, grieving and ungrim, Whispered, "I made for you the mysteries, Beyond all battles moves the Paraclete." II The soldier chucked his rifle in the dust, And slipped his pack, and wiped his neck, and said -- "O Christ Almighty, stop this bleeding fight !" Above that hill the sky was stained like rust With smoke. In sullen daybreak flaring red The guns were thundering bombardment's blight. The soldier cried, "I was born full of lust, With hunger, thirst, ...
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Platform One

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Holiday squeals, as if all were scrambling for their lives, Panting aboard the “Cornish Riviera”. Then overflow of relief and luggage and children, Then duckling to smile out as the station moves. Out there on the platform, under the rain, Under his rain-cape, helmet and full pack, Somebody, head bowed reading something, Doesn’t know he’s missing his train. He’s completely buried in that book. He’s forgotten utterly where he is. He’s forgotten Paddington, forgotten Timetables, forgotten the long, rocking Cradle of a journey into the golden West, The coach’s soft wingbeat – as light And straight as a dove’s flight. Like a graveyard statue sentry cast In blackened bronze. Is he reading poems? A letter? The burial service? The raindrops Beaded along his helmet rim are bronze. The words on his page are bronze. Their meanings bronze. Sunk in his bronze world he stands, enchanted. His bronze mind is deep among the dead. Sunk so deep among the...
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Sylvia Plath

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Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath © Bettmann/CORBIS The American writer Sylvia Plath was born in Massachusetts in 1932. Her father, a Prussian immigrant who had been an expert in bees and teacher of German at Boston University, died of undiagnosed diabetes when she was eight. She was a prodigiously hard-working school child, publishing her first poem also at the age of eight. She had written 50 short stories by the time she won a prize scholarship to Smith College, where she excelled academically and published poems and journalistic pieces. She spent the summer of 1953 in New York, having been awarded a guest editorship at the magazine  Mademoiselle , but suffered a breakdown on her return home and attempted suicide shortly afterwards. After undergoing treatment, she returned to Smith in 1954, graduated  summa cum laude  in June 1955, and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge between 1955 and 57. There, she met the poet...
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