shot glass
title
Issue # 3 January 2011
"... brevity is the soul of wit ..."
- William Shakespeare

Bio


Primarily a humorous poet, Peter Goulding rails at the world from the comfort of his suburban home in Dublin, Ireland. Selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions series in 2010, he has somehow managed to convince editors in four continents to publish his more serious poetry, usually by promising to go away if they do. He works in a warehouse and wishes he didn't.


Peter Goulding


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Vandalism

They broke into the cemetery
and daubed blood-red swastikas
on a line of pristine white headstones,
now screaming out of newspaper pages,
like a row of pdf files
in a folder of Word docs.

Angry or bored youths
with no comprehension
of the squalid and now irrelevant
deaths these men suffered
face down in rainwater trenches,
picked out by unseen snipers,
blown to carcasses by a rain of death.

They may remove the paint
but not the tragedy
of lessons unlearnt.