Rose-tinted glasses

    Blood, everywhere.

or perhaps rose petals, covering a bed.

 

    Screams of desperation,

or Squeals of giggling girls, tickled. "Stop!"

 

    Shining metal tanks,

or Barbie's latest car, comes in pink.

 

    Sun reflects off guns,

or magnifyiing glasses as children play.

 

    At 17, joining the army.

At 17, starting the final year of school.

 

    21, alive. Lucky.

21, very much alive. Parties.

 

    70, a veteran, awful nightmares never cease.

70, looking back on the 'good old days.' Youth. Childhood.

 

    death, the coffin carried by uniforms.

death, closest friends from happy days surround.

            separation.

together.

 

 

    War.

                                    Peace.

Author's Note

What do you think of the title? Is it suitable?

Reviews

[Penelope Allen]

The title? All I noticed about the title was that it begins with R like most of your posts. Is this intentional? Do you have a thing about R? :-)
Now, my take on this poem was that the capitals at the beginning of each line took away from the drama of the piece. In other words .. they were distracting. I know there is an .. um .. poet belief[?] out there that each line must be capitalized or should be capitalized .. or .. whatever the latest edict from those who teach poetry .,. however - if you check out the master poets .. the ancient ones .. the ones who capitalized each line... you know .. they also followed other formats. Stuff like sonnets - pantoums - villanelles - kyrielles - yada yada yada. These authors practiced their art with aplomb within specific rules. IMO - non structured poetry which is quite difficult to write breaks away from all of the 'rules' .. right? Why keep the capitals then? Do you see what I mean?
My favourite part was the contract between Barbie's car and tanks.

[hiralarious]

Interesting.. I didn't really get it(but I don't get many things) but I thought it sounded pretty good :D

[Drew Wade]

I liked it. I think that you can do whatever you want when it comes to capital letters, because rules like 'thou shalt not use capitals in a non-structured poem' fly in the face of what not being structured is supposed to be all about. so don't worry about that. they seem to make a lot of sense for the point you're making.

anyway, as for the poem itself, I kept on getting a certain thought in my head. I guess the thought was that the person who chose the army, or whatever, was choosing the path less taken, as in, responsibility... and the person who chose the other way, the party life, wasn't realizing what they were getting in to.

oh well, that's the beauty of poetry. people get different things from it.

[Legion]

What interesting contrasts. How life seems to be such a conglomeration of differences. Silver spoons to hand outs. You never know what you might get with it. Kudos on an exemplarary write.