Forced Poem
During Our Lifetime and Beyond
During Our Lifetime and Beyond,
Let me have bent my shoulders
to the music that is life;
Not to be one of those,
one of the most short-sighted ones
Who sense no time;
have no sense,
Who cannot see
the urgent need to cut sharply back
On the ammunition in the yellow eye of a gun
That threatens to reduce the world
to powder.
But rather, let me have been
one of those who played a role,
So that the leaders
were helped to find a suitable come back
with words, not fire.
"Cut Sharply Back..."
Backstory
This poem originated as a college creative writing class exercise, in which each person was given 5 slips of paper containing phrases clipped from various unrelated sources.
These phrases were to be used in any sequence, and be unchanged (except perhaps for tense), and in their entirety, to construct a poem.
Other words could be added around the original source phrases, but could not separate a phrase. The original phrases are underlined.
As I have done here, it was allowed to use one of the bits as a title.
This poem was written in May of 1987, with a minor edit in May of 2010, and another tiny tweak in March of 2018.
© 2010 Liz Elias