1. Barking Dogs...

Apologies are not really in order, I suppose, since the only people who read this log are I, myself and me...

Still, for the sake of good order, one of the reasons posting has been more weekly lately, rather than semi-daily, is I have been trying to dig out yet another of the poem cycles the unknown poet of the Third Galaxy called a "Sonnete Corona" -- but to put this one together, I have had to delve into not only the 2nd level but also the 3rd level footnotes of the Absolute Truth, 21st Edition.

The concept in these poem cycles is that the last line of each verse is the first line of the following verse. The last poem in the cycle begins with the last line of the last verse, folowed by the last line of the penultimate verse and concluding with the first line of the first verse.

The unknown poet did not title this collection, so I have taken the liberty of calling it "Our Common Insanity". The first poem he called, "Barking Dogs..."

We woke because we heard the dogs barking...
We thought it was nothing...

We should have known better!

But then, we heard the sound of soldiers' harking,
spitting in the cold and misty damp weather!

I called them soldiers -- but that is not what they were:
scoundrels, mercenaries and killers for hire!

It was obvious what would all too soon occur:
a night of pillage and rape and our village on fire...

That was the time of the War of a Hundred Years...
or was it Seven or Thirty -- or more, or less?
(It's hard to get those kinds of numbers straight...)

All I know for sure is that we harvested tears...
the root of war is planted in greed and hate.

We do things much better today, we kill from great distance!
War has become greater than Pestilence!