Picture of an American soldier

The photograph depicts a man at war.
You will have seen him many times before,
the still, stunned face of shock and awe,
his gaunt and gallowed gaze, full of dread,
replaying the howling horrors in his head.

His boneless body rests against the rocks,
the while his mind makes memories to mock
the dazzled, dream-filled boy, the cost
of whose survival has climbed so high
he thinks, one day of this despair he’ll die.

The photograph depicts the hell of war.
You will have seen it many times before
and gazed with eyes of shock and awe;
and wondered at the man who caught his look
and used his grief, to bring us all to book.

© Rachel North
Memorial Day tributes as US suffers its 1,500th casualty in Afghanistan
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Rachel is a Nurse, who has a passion for writing creatively.

Sunday Editorial

A curious aspect of Poetry24 is how quiet our readers on. We know you're out there - we check our stats! - but you rarely leave comments on the poems. Maybe the poems speak for themselves? But we'd love to know what you think of the poems, a favourite line or your views on the issues they cover. Please tell us why you don't comment in the comments box below!

Meanwhile, it's difficult to generalise about a week that has covered everything from mass murder to Martin Hodges' pleasingly-alliterative Chasing Cheese.

But the main theme was a sense of loss:- Patricia McMahon's harrowing Violation listed Ratko Mladic's appalling legacy in Srebrenica before felling the reader with its devasting closing line: '...we still live with, our hearts shaved raw'; and Rachel North's powerful sonnet His Father's Died voiced Tom Daley's rage against his own loss. If only, as Geoffrey Datson puts it in his thought-provoking 'Pet Rock's Lament': 'none of it is true.'

It was almost a relief to have an attack of killer vegetables (not a line I'd expected to write in a poetry editorial) in Juliet Wilson's Death and the Cucumber. But the week finished with a lingering sadness, in Stephen Smith's evocative An Irish Emigrant Returned, which tells the story of a generation and doesn't seem topical until a long-suppressed anger surfaces in its closing lines.

Finally, thanks to EssentialWriters.com for this but don't be shy to comment here too!

Clare