Power and conflict poetry

• Ozymandias


  'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and dispair' 'Colossal wreck' 'The lone and level sands stretch far away'
• The Prelude

  'It was an act of stealth and troubled pleasure'

  'Towered up between me and the stars'

  'huge and mighty forms'
• My Last Duchess


  'Half-flush that dies along her throat'

  'I gave commands'

  'Looking as if she were alive'
• The Charge of the Light Brigade

  'Half a league, half a league, half a league'

  'Rode the six hundred'

  'Flash'd all their sabres bare'
• Exposure

  'Our brains ache, in the merciless iced winds that knive us'

  'flickering gunnery rumbles'

  'Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces'
• Storm on the island

  'We are prepared: we built our houses squat'

  'Exploding comfortably down on the cliffs'

  'Spits like a tame cat turned savage'
• Bayonet Charge

  'Bullets smacking the belly out of the air'

  'numb as a smashed arm'

  'a yellow hare that rolled like a flame'
• Remains

  'Probably armed, possibly not'

  'His blood-shadow stays on the street'

  'his bloody life in my bloody hands'
• Poppies

  'of yellow bias binding around your blazer'

  'like a treasure chest'

  'leaned against it like a wishbone'
• War Photographer

  'a half-formed ghost'

  'blood stained into foreign dust'

  'they do not care'
• Tissue

  'Paper thinned by age or touching'

  'The sun shines through their borderlines'

  'fly our lives like paper kites'
• The Emigree


  'bright filled paperweight'

  'My city hides behind me'

  'they mutter death'
• Checking out me history

  'Dem tell me'

  'Bandage up me eye with me own history'

  'I carving out me identity'
• Kamikaze


  'strung out like bunting'

  'only we children still chattered and laughed'

  'he must have wondered which had been the better way to die'
• London

  'Runs in blood down palace walls'

  'Mind-forged manacles'

  'In every cry of every man, In every infants cry of fear'