Poems

She was a pretty, nicely mannered mare,
The children's pet, the master's pride and care,
Until a man in khaki came one day,
Looked at her teeth, and hurried her away.

With other horses packed into a train
She hungered for her master's voice in vain;
And later, led 'twixt planks that scare and slip,
They slung her, terrified, on board a ship.

Next came, where thumps and throbbing filled the air,
Her first experience of mal de mare;
And when that oscillating trip was done
They hitched her up in traces to a gun.

She worked and pulled and sweated with the best;
A stranger now her glossy coat caressed
Till flashing thunderstorms came bursting round
And spitting leaden hail bestrewed the ground.

With quivering limbs, and silky ears laid back,
She feels a shock succeed a sharper crack,
And, whinnying her pitiful surprise,
Staggers and falls, and tries in vain to rise.

Alone, forsaken, on a foreign field
What moral does this little record yield ?
Who tends the wounded horses in the war ?
Well that is what the Blue Cross League is for.
...

After that hot gospeller has levelled all but the churched sky,
I wrote the tale by tallow of a city's death by fire;
Under a candle's eye, that smoked in tears, I
Wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire.
All day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales,
Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar;
Loud was the bird-rocked sky, and all the clouds were bales
Torn open by looting, and white, in spite of the fire.
By the smoking sea, where Christ walked, I asked, why

...

Short Tutorial on Writing a Robert Frost Mastepiece
For the first three stanzas use a rhyming scheme of aaba, then the last stanza bbbb: now choose a mundane topic but being an egomaniac, pump it up to seem important. Like this:
I wandered by a shop's bright window
I saw a person I think I know
It was me, in the reflection clear
What a clever person it did show.

The shopkeeper did see me leer,
As I adored my image there
Reflecting like a modern bard

...