Haibuns, Gembuns, and war
Wilfred Owen wrote a beautiful and disturbing poem ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’ in which he revisited the story of Abram and Isaac in the context of the first World War. The poem ends with the couplet below
But the old man would not so, but slew his son
and half the seed of Europe, one by one
This always struck me as very powerful and has stuck with me, perhaps helped by the fact that Britten set it to music as part of his War Requiem, and it keeps coming to mind as we are bombarded by images of current wars…
https://tonyearnshaw.substack.com/p/carrier-pigeons
