GASSED

by Royal Rhodes

Today, U.S. officials announced that the final munition in the nation's obsolete stockpile of chemical weapons has been safely destroyed—a disarmament milestone decades in the making. 

—U.S. Department of Defense, July 7, 2023

Gassed (1919) by John Singer Sargent —Wikiart

The staggering line of gassed soldiers, each Tommy blindfolded as if in a deadly children's game, moved slowly over a ground-cover of wounded and dead, and were linked by a sagging rope of hands on shoulders. The society painter, more famous for portraits of the wealthy and renowned, a world of watered-silk frocks and highly polished silver tea sets, covered a vast canvas with these larger-than-life figures that overshadow the startled visitors gazing at the past. In the background a spirited soccer game caught their eye.

War made forests ash

and remade farmland

to fields of headstones

Royal Rhodes lives in Gambier, Ohio, and has published poems in The New Verse News, Ekphrastic Review Challenge, and Snakeskin Poetry.

PESSIMIST'S ODE

by Carolyn Wells

Researchers with the Danish Meteorological Institute making their way over meltwater topping sea ice in northwest Greenland STEFFEN OLSEN via Forbes, August 16, 2019

If Greenland is melting,
I'm going to drink expensive Sancerre.
The reefs are bleached, the white rhinos extinct , the pangolins over hunted,
the forests of Siberia burning, the 2 degree Celsius rising.
I'm going to read the entire works of Dickens. I'm going to quit my job and make soap, sleep with young men, plant carrots and onions and store them all winter, sell my apartment and finally go live in France, where I will stand in silence in front of each WW1 monument, and reflect.
You who died for no reason.

Carolyn Wells is a member of Brevitas poetry group in NYC and a contributor to Alimentum. Her book Your Kiss is a River was published by Nirala Press.

CHANCE ENCOUNTER

by Robert M. Chute

Found at the annual library sale, stained but
solid and readable, a New Directions Paperbook:
The Collected Poems Of Wilfred Owen for
twenty-five cents. Chance may lead you to the light.

The book discovered on a cluttered table
like some long buried, corroded, unexploded
World War I artillery shell French farmers still
turn up by chance — bones long leached away.

Varying brown stains, mostly on the cover and
edge of pages (coffee we assume), made
random illumination fitting for his last-minute
mis-chance death, that particular bullet

not seeking him in particular as the war wound down.
“Nothing personal,” Death said: November, 4, 1918.


Robert M. Chute's first poem for TheNewVerse.News was posted on August 6, 2008. Chute's book of poetry based on scientific articles, Reading Nature, is available from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.