Back in the days when youngsters played outdoors unsupervised and war-game consoles were the stuff of science fiction, we learned some fundamental lessons about the reality of life and death.
As my late father frequently remarked, "Experience is the best school but the fees are often high.”
Blackbird employs a Chiasmic rhyme scheme.
BLACKBIRD
With catapult, once school was finished,
I went to hunt in woodland, high
above Belfast, in summer light
and heard, among leafed branches spread,
a blackbird, singing like a bell.
I took aim, shot, the missile flew ...
... unerringly, my aim was true.
With awful suddenness it fell,
all broken. Exultation fled,
to be replaced by sickly fright.
I knelt to watch it slowly die.
Within me somewhere, light diminished.
Chiasmus
Repetition of any group of verse elements (including rhyme and grammatical structure) in reverse order, such as the rhyme scheme ABCDDCBA. Examples can be found in Biblical scripture (“But many that are first / Shall be last, / And many that are last / Shall be first”; Matthew 19:30). See also John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”).
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