I have now deleted from my life,
An army man and an army wife,
Though it sliced me like the knife,
I saw no option.

I questioned not the courage there,
Nor intent to prove a care,
Nor the man of action rare,
But blind obedience.

If I am a parcel of vain strivings tied,
It is a horse’s conscience you provide,
So friendship for truth’s sake has died,
And suffered greatly.

It was the praise of Harry’s sin,
Applauded seven seconds in,
His ominous and passing grin,
Precisely seven seconds in,
That ominous and passing grin,
Which tipped me over.

I've not the time to argue, or,
The energy to make case for,
The pulling from all foreign war,
While ignorance of this magnitude reigns.

© Craig Guthrie

Prince Harry in Afghanistan

Craig Guthrie is from Wirral, UK. You can read more of his work on his blog, Satan is Biting My Ankle

It was Sunday.
I heard a gunshot, not so far from where I was standing.
The rain was falling hard now,
it bounced off my helmet like pennies in a sweet jar.
Ting, ting, ting.
Mud had begun to rise further up my legs.
It smelt dirty, hot, and miserable.
This was a long way from home.
I missed the sweet smell of pancakes on a Sunday morning,
and fresh cereal on Mondays.
I was jealous and hated that I had to eat out of a grotty metal tin;
cold beans, hard rice, dirty water.
I can only moan to myself, in my head, inaudible to the rest.
My friend died yesterday.
A bullet zipped through the night air and pierced his left lung.
Unstoppable.
Now, there was more gun fire up ahead.
The air was thick and heavy, suffocating.
I dropped to the floor, repulsing as the dirt invaded my eyes.
With my vision blurred, I crawled to a fortress of rocks.
Looking around I saw an arm leave its body,
a sea of red followed.
The medic attended.
The captain was shouting over the radio for help.
The bullets became heavier and the noise became louder.
I could hear my own breathing over it all,
my heart was beating too fast.
The heat from the blaze seared my skin like boiling water.
I gripped my gun, pulled it to my chest, trigger finger ready.
I thought of home, of the sweet Sunday pancakes.
I looked up to the sun.

© Nicola Copeland 

British soldier who died from wounds named

Nicola Copeland, 25 years old, started writing poetry about 5 years ago. She is studying towards a Masters in Writing from Liverpool John Moores University and blogs at nicolacopelandblog.wordpress.com

Months spent weaving the same rug,
Threads thickening between Shasanna and her mother,
Like twigs in a nest, which her grandmother’s rolling white eye
Never stops watching. Days spent bent over, soak her bones in pain,
Dissolved by the magic smoke.
The dust jumps as the guns

March closer, boom boom boom. The guns
Are coming to steal the rug
That they have so nearly completed! “Or the smoke
That I need more than food,” says Mother.
Shasannah’s calloused ten-year-old hands have started trembling with pain
Without it. It puts the gleam in Grandmother’s blind eye.

Dust swirls around the room and clings to Shasanna’s eye.
She fears being blind when the guns
Smash down the door, spitting shouts and red pain,
Tearing and trampling the brown rug
Generations wove on the gnarled loom. Mother and daughter. Daughter and mother,
Hoping to sell it to buy a spoonful of medicine, not smoke.

Shasanna gulps down a pipeful of sugary poppy-smoke.
Too much in one gasp stings her eyes
And she shrieks. “Ssshhh, your father,” warns her mother.
“Where is your father? We will hunt him down!” bluster the guns.
Shasanna’s lashes flutter like birds’ wings, blurring the rug.

Rather than healing, this sharpens the pain.

Scars from yesterday stretch their claws of pain,
“Shasanna, don’t waste the smoke”
Says her grandmother. After weaving her bones into sixty rugs,
The smoke does not let the light through her left eye,
Or seal her ears from the thunder of guns,
Or give back her name that is buried with her mother.

“Give her the pipe, girl,” snaps Mother,
Envying Shasanna, who is yet to know real pain.
She snatches it, watched by the barrel of the gun
Strapped to the wall, guarding their supply of smoke
From the poor and pain-racked with bony eyes.
It is more important than a loom in weaving a rug.

When the guns breathe smoke on their doorstep,
Grandmother, mother, and daughter will clutch their pain,
And hide their eyes behind the rug’s thick weave.

© Rosemary J. Collins

Sharp rise in Afghan drug addicts, UN report says
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Rosemary is 18 and currently waiting for her A-level results, which will, hopefully, allow her to study English at university. Her dream is to have a book published.

A faceless Buddha stares out into nothing
his features rubbed out by wiser men
He and this bare brown earth

bear witness to the vicissitudes of empires
which every now and then
bring in a hundred thousand men

led by swanky generals
full of ideas and strategies
who invariably leave clueless or dead

beaten by voices on the wind
that rages through ravines
and around strange shapes

in the looming terrain
a landscape which consumes them
absorbing something from the invader

before belching them out
to kick him along the silken road
full of substances –

yet empty of all substance
Just like the bodhisattva
sitting captive in Kabul museum

once a saviour
now unable to save himself.

© David Francis Barker 2011

Will UK troops follow US out of Afghanistan?

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David Francis Barker: 'I try to paint, write poetry, prose, sometimes music - I guess that makes me an artist.' francisbarkerart.wordpress.com