(Photo credit: iansand)
War Along The Front
Today, there is an urgency to Wind
As if it is the trumpet call to war.
It stirs the clouds and to the battle sends
Them ‘cross the land to some quite distant shore.
Wild Wind is busy heading north today;
A general, he urges on his troops.
With whirring words, he whips them on their way;
They speed across the sky in full sail, sloops.
They neither pause nor take a sideways glance,
But, single-minded, jut their chins and march,
An army in the blue, as if in trance,
As crisp and stiff as white shirts full of starch.
They march to meet a colder northern foe
That’s rushing to invade the warmer climes;
Two forces will collide; a line will grow
Of turbulence and trouble, brutish times.
And as the armies clash, the battle sound
Will boom and rattle all along the front,
With flash of cannon on the battle ground
As one’s advance the other tries to blunt.
The warm and cold mix in explosive drafts;
Storms blossom high into the humid air;
The lightning streaks the sky with jagged shafts,
Spears thrown in battle – all below beware.
The hail may fall like shot hurled from a gun,
And pound, unmerciful, both man and beast.
A rope may drop from boiling skies and stun
The populace below, from great to least.
But though the war brings devastation, woe,
It may be last resort for some to gain
Their way against an unrelenting foe –
Like drought – and win the victory of rain.
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© Dennis Lange and thebardonthehill.wordpress.com, 2012.
The Bard on the Hill 
excellent poem!
Well done sire, well done.
Dennis, this is absolutely beautiful. Your use of figurative language is masterful. Not only is the imagery powerful, but you cause the reader to “feel” everything that’s going on as well. Now, I have to ask: were you watching a real storm brewing as you wrote this?
Thank you. I was pleased with it as it progressed and when I finished it. No, there wasn’t a storm brewing as I wrote it. I was sitting on the opposite side of my house from the view in the header above, on some steps leading up to a parking place by the road that runs by. (My hill still climbs above where my house is perched.) The wind was blowing from the south that day and the clouds were rushing north along with it as they do here when a front is coming. So, that’s how it started. I love storms and the rest was just from memory, not because one was actually ongoing.
A nice one. What other concept is as close as the concept of war, to be used in describing this natural event of stormy clouds?
Ha! Of course, from your good memory. No active storm brewing.
Very well written bard.
Thank you!