Bugger This For a Game of Soldiers

by Ann Drysdale

The story has it that when the computer wizards fabricated the battle scenes for Lord of the Rings, the Director decreed that each figure should be programmed to act as an individual and, during the first conflict, some of them ran away…

Hiding in the enhanced hills of the antipodes
We are doing not too badly, all things considered.
We have each of us chosen to step outside the picture
And watch it dispassionately, without benefit of popcorn.

We happy few, we voluntary out-takes—
Virtually indestructible, having no substance—
Sought out our several ways into this haven.
Like Legionnaires, we do not discuss our reasons.

We are a small fistful of hand-knitted fictions,
With fellowship programmed digitally into our pixels;
Having been created utterly true to ourselves
We cannot now be false to one another.

And so we fadge, we Orcs, Elves, Wraiths and Rohirrim,
Carousing round the fire in a ring.

2
July, 2009

Ann Drysdale was born near Manchester, raised in London, and married in Birmingham. She ran a smallholding and brought up three children on the North York Moors, and now lives in South Wales. She was a journalist for many years, writing, among other things, the longest-running by-line column in the Yorkshire Evening Post. She has won a few prizes and published several books, including two memoirs, Three-three, two-two, five-six and Discussing Wittgenstein. Of her four volumes of poetry from Peterloo, the most recent, Between Dryden and Duffy, appeared in 2005. A fifth collection, Quaintness and Other Offences, is scheduled for 2009.

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