[OC] [FB] Untitled, in response to a call for violence

The potion molotova  
is a democratic blade.  
It cuts the one who throws it  
same as everyone in range.  

When one starts the mortal tango  
and all of us must dance or fall,  
the kids will learn just what we teach them:  
steps for their own century ball.  

Maybe kill is what we must  
and death’s our children’s legacy, but  
if swords could rend the world to peace  
then where we are’s not where we’d be.

https://piefed.blahaj.zone/post/833431#comment_5019959Open link View original on piefed.blahaj.zone

Comments5

Goodman

discuss.tchncs.de

I like it. It's not entirely hopeful, but also not hopeless. The metaphores work and the lines are good at connecting with the tense zeitgeist. As for me, I hope to avoid the dance for a little longer.

The second stanza made me think of "Peacefield" by Ghost. It's a song about the the Russian revolution. Also semi dark, semi hopeful for the time after the cycle of war and violence, even though it isn't over yet.

Here is a section from the song:

Every new generation
Hails a grand usurpation
Devoid of treason
For a man in a mirror
It's all getting clearer
That dark is the season

Your love, bright as the starlight
Oh child, still we can see
A black moon over the peacefield
Oh child, stay close to me

We are legion
Join us
One day, fate will find a way through the marches of death
And right back to the bearer of light

P.S. how do you format your post to look the way it does?

queerlilhayseed reply

piefed.blahaj.zone

Thanks! ❤️ I'm not familiar with Ghost or Peacefield, I'll look them up.

the formatting is a multiline code block, made with three backticks at the beginning and three backticks at the end. So the first line would look like:

``` text and then you'd add whatever goes in the middle
the word "text" is there to tell the renderer not to add syntax highlighting.
If you leave it out it'll default to whatever the reader's default is.
- you can add whitespace and stuff and it'll be preserved
then at the bottom add another line like this: ```

and the whole thing looks like so:

and then you'd add whatever goes in the middle  
the word "text" is there to tell the renderer not to add syntax highlighting.  
If you leave it out it'll default to whatever the reader's default is. 
        - you can add whitespace and stuff and it'll be preserved  
then at the bottom add another line like this:

In case that doesn't render correctly in your fedi app, here's a screenshot of the preview of this comment :

queerlilhayseed

piefed.blahaj.zone

Now that I've googled it I don't think molotova is a name for molotov cocktails, just a nonsense Russification I made up to make the meter work. I think I just liked the way "potion molotova" sounds so I let it slide, but I don't think it works.

If I wrote it again I would probably change the first line.

EmpathicVagrant reply

lemmy.world

I liked the phrase, I felt it added weight and tone to the intro.

queerlilhayseed reply

piefed.blahaj.zone

Me too. It's got a lot of nice "O" sounds. I think it feels a little hacky to me because it is: "cocktail" is evenly stressed and it's clunky to fit into the stressed-unstressed metric I tend to default to when writing quickly. PO'-tion MO'-lo-TO'-va is much easier to work in so I went with that and then wrote the rest of the poem. Could I have found a way to make MO'-lo-Tov' COCK'-TAIL' work? Maybe if I'd given it more time, but I would have had to think harder about how the meter works, or just let the meter be inconsistent which I often do. Getting the meter just right on a poem is hard.