If men will be taller
In the battlefield are there death tollers?
As you sign in your draft card:
man or woman?
will the war be so grand that gender no longer matters?
Must we bake with margarine instead of butter
Will all protein be spam?
All the food I eat is rationed
Glory to man!
(This is something I wrote a few months ago that I felt like sharing)
I like this an awful lot. Just in addition to being delighted to see you back on POW. Yay! Starting backwards, I really like the rhythm of the final paragraph. There's something really natural and really compelling about "all the food I eat is rationed" followed by "glory to man." It's very sardonic, very funny.
ReplyDeleteI love the part about gender not mattering anymore. Not just because this is something I think about when it comes to the draft all the time, but also that the one thing that makes gender no longer matter is this gigantic war.
One thing I had a question about was the phrase "death tollers." I assume it means someone who tallies the death total, but for some reason this term felt a little ambiguous while the rest of the piece is very specific.
The only other thing I would mention is that the title is "will they draft the interstellar war" but most of the references are to things that would happen in any normal earth bound war (with the exception of the gender thing). Perhaps include some more cosmic references?
A great piece of work overall. It's very dry and also kind of melancholy.
I like this poem. I'm generally a sucker for sci-fi, so this is really up my alley. Right off the bat, I do like the brevity of the piece (I get the feeling of something floating in space...) but I still want more. I'd like to know more about what this possible future could look like.
ReplyDeleteI like the rhythm and off-rhyming of the first stanza. The differing line lengths add to the rhythm, and though I'm not going to do scansion on your poem, the last line has a lovely, punchy rhythm. Going off of what Cerasi mentioned about the word "death tollers", I don't really know what it means either. But I'm kind of okay with that. Since we are imagining what this future would look like, death tollers could be some kind of clean-up robot after a battle or whatever. So that word sounded cool to me. However, if you are going for some specific concept here (like if there really is something called a death toller), I'm not sure what that is.
The second stanza seems to lose the rhythm of the first. The final line especially did not seem to have the same punchy-ness of the previous stanza. I do like the concept of the 2nd stanza, but maybe you could play around with the words to get the rhythm more consistent.
I like how the questions about food in the third stanza lead to how its now all rationed. This stanza also seems to pick back up with the rhythm of the first stanza, which I like. The last two lines are fabulous. I can see "Glory to man!" on war paraphernalia and on the side of spaceships. But with the juxtaposition of the previous line, it brings up question about how glorious is man? Would we win the war? ... So great.