The Devil’s Intervention

For uni this week I have to intervene in a text. Write it from another point of view, change the genre, the feel, something like that. Just something I knocked up in the car before I left… It was a sort of counterpoint to one of Judith Wright’s anti-war poems (specifically the pacific). It’s about a soldier who really likes war. And, of course, it’s unfinished.

—

The rising sun shall become the falling star,
For I will grab it from the sky and cast it into the pacific
And it will burst like the bursting bombs.

Noone loves war but a soldier might hate it,
And is hate on the battlefield the same as love in peacetime?
Does it not drive you to rip and to tear?

And the devil on my shoulder
Shall shoot the angel on the other,
for there is no room for angels in war.

And I shall cry, ‘no, no, that is not me,
It is my devil!’ but there is no room
For a devil in peace, and you are that devil now,
Wholly a devil, and the devil does not love peace.