Saturday, May 3, 2014

Butterfly Dream: Twilit Sky by Marilyn Humbert

English Original

twilit sky ...
soldiers
lock and load

Marilyn Humbert


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

黎明的天空...
戰士們準備武器
去戰鬥

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

黎明的天空...
战士们準备武器
去战鬥


Bio Sketch

Marilyn Humbert lives in the Northern Suburbs of Sydney NSW surrounded by bush. Her pastimes include writing free verse poetry, tanka, tanka prose and related genre. She is the leader of Bottlebrush Tanka Group and member of the Huddle and Bowerbird Tanka Groups. Her tanka appears in Australian and International Journals.

2 comments:

  1. Technically speaking, the shift in theme and image, combined with the historically allusive American slang in L3, provokes the reader's reflection on war and peace.

    And cinematically speaking, this haiku reads like a poetic rendering of the establishing shot of a war movie.

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  2. Below is excerpted from the Wiktionary entry, titled "Lock and Load:"

    Originated in American English, supposedly as an instructional command to prepare an M1 Garand, the main rifle used during World War II, for battle.[1] the expression was popularized 1949 by John Wayne in the movie Sands of Iwo Jima. Various similar phrases predate it, including in transposed form as “load and lock”. It is disputed whether the command "lock and load" was ever used by the US military in WWII. The term, "lock and load" was used in the US Army as late as 1969 and was also used in Vietnam.

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