Ellipse #78(…candy bar)

Joe Guillotin 1738 ( Saintes) – 1814 ( Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris)



Saw a kid in a gas mask today
Five years old- maybe four
Stole a Hershey bar from the remains
of a burnt down store.

Riot gear and hopscotch
Slingshots and hand grenades.

Well, that kid- with that precious chocolate in hand
He found a soldier, lying on the ground
And there, he kneeled down
The soldier had a gut shot wound
And bits of shrapnel in his small intestine
In his hand,
a photograph of his wife he rubbed
with a bloody thumb.
From the waist down, he began to grow numb

And that kid in that gas mask
He looked down with a bit of pity
On the soldier with the seeping wound
and soon to be widowed wife.
He took PITY on that soldier's
poor, unfortunate life.

He took that candy bar from his back pocket,
And he GAVE that dying soldier his chocolate.
That soldier- he had a tear in his eye..
For that one gracious deed before he would die.

He looked up in the gas mask glass,
and saw his reflection!
He smiled wide,
and with sincere, yet trembling inflection
said, ‘Thanks kid.'

And that kid, he saw that smile-
and he pondered on it for awhile.

'That's ok. I'm going to steal a TV now instead'

-]0[

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

1:05 min read
107

Quick analysis:

Scheme XAXA XX BCXCDBXEE XXCFXF GGHH XDXDX II X
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 1,089
Words 217
Stanzas 8
Stanza Lengths 4, 2, 9, 6, 4, 5, 2, 1

Joe Guillotin

Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (French: [ʒɔzɛf iɲas ɡijɔtɛ̃]; 28 May 1738 – 26 March 1814) was a French physician, politician and freemason who proposed on 10 October 1789 the use of a device to carry out death penalties in France, as a less painful method of execution than existing methods. Although he did not invent the guillotine and opposed the death penalty, his name became an eponym for it. The actual inventor of the prototype was a man named Tobias Schmidt, working with the king's physician, Antoine Louis. more…

All Joe Guillotin poems | Joe Guillotin Books

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