Deliverance From Life

A soldier, taking the road that lies before him

To no man does the earth mean so much.

The Front is a cage.

A torturing image of brown earth and dead soldiers

The earth itself is raging.

We have become wild beasts, death is hunting us down

We are dead.

Beyond the skyline is a country with flowers,

lying so still that he would like to weep.

A soldier, seeking and fighting for nothing but deliverance.

Author's Note: The purpose of this was to illustrate the conflict between love of life and one's duty; to show the soldier's hopelessness to the point where death is a release from life torn by war. This was an English 10 assignment of analysis of the novel All Quiet on the Western Front. It is a "Found poem", composed entirely of lines taken from another work of literature, in this case, A.Q.W.F. so I feel it is important to understand that the only part of this poem that is "mine" is the arrangement of Remarque's lines to shape my own work. Oh, and the crappy title too.

(taken from pages 55, 69, 95, 101, 113, 114, 115, and 121of Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front)