I wrote this last year. We were working on poems in our English Literature class and our teacher gave us a link to a portfolio of photographs taken by a war photographer named Larry Burrow during the Vietnam War. The photo (attached as media) that the poem is based off of was taken by him. “Lance Corporal” was the title of the photograph and I decided to keep that title for the poem. 

I wanted to address some of the things that were spoken about in the captions of the pictures as well as the article below the portfolio. Parts of the poem address the horror that these soldiers faced during the war, parts address the fear of dying, but having to do your job anyway, the fear of losing someone, the relief that reaching safety brings, and what the soldiers feel after they get out of the fire. I hope I have done so.

I used the structure, as well as some ideas of what to write about, from a poem called “War Photographer” by scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy.

 

 

Lance Corporal

In the doorway he views with horror

the green inferno of the war zone.

Light falls in and illuminates

his fallen friend, as though this were a stage,

and him an actor.

Death. Destruction. Pain

 

His job. Shots echo in his ears.

His hands to not shake, though

his mind is running. Height. Safe again.

shooting down, cover fire,

to fields of purgatory. Hellish landscape

unending, covered with labyrinths.

 

Something is happening. A friend’s corpse

slowly starts to slump before his eyes,

a shell of what was. He hears the screams 

of this man, how he did what he could

without complaint to do what he must

and how the bullets rained and exploded with dust.

 

A thousand deaths in red and brown

for which his people will congratulate,

from death comes glory. His eyeballs tear 

with dirt and dust between weights and mess-hall meals.

From helicopter he watches, rapt, at what 

he does and no one understands.