Letter: Scribbling while Sarajevo burns
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Your support makes all the difference.Sir: On the Independent publishing poems by British poets about Bosnia:
The soldier sleeping in the yard
Is easily caught off his guard
And when he wakes he'll think it hard
To lose a limb,
He'll need the caring British bard
To walk for him.
The widow hiding in the shed
May well be hardened to her dread
She draws her scarf about her head
But fears to stir,
She needs a poet who's well read
To speak for her.
The children starving in the street
Need little more to drink or eat,
They pit-a-pat on naked feet
Into a rhyme.
The British poem is discreet
Most of the time.
The charred corpse in the blackened hall,
The foul deserted hospital,
The skulls and scapulae, the wall
Streaked red and brown,
Needs British poets, one and all,
To write them down.
This stanza that I've nicked from Burns,
I throw at you, with no returns,
Dear Editor: each 'poem' earns
A Bosnian brick.
Read poems while Sarajevo burns?
It makes me sick.
Yours faithfully,
GEORGE SZIRTES
Hitchin, Hertfordshire
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