2024-01-07 17:22:55
“In the United States Navy, it is tradition that the first entry of the new year in the logbooks be written in verse,” tell The Christian Science Monitor. An exercise that is by no means easy, “especially since [ce] are also documents with legal value” who must “report details that are not really lyrical”. Some, however, rise to the challenge.
Even though a slam event on a US Navy ship was recently decried as a drift “woke” of the institution, poetry “has a rich history in the armed forces”, underlines the magazine, citing painful verses composed on a First World War battlefield, and other lighter ones about the pandemic. For soldiers far from home, it can alleviate “the pain of separation” and boost morale, says Samuel Cox, director of the Naval History and Heritage Command, which organizes an annual competition for the best ship’s book poem.
Link between generations
Last year’s winner, Lieutenant Artem Sherbinin, told in verse the story of his boat, which was about to be decommissioned. “In 91 he was still young / And swinging Tomahawks over Saddam’s Iraq”, can we read in particular in allusion to the Gulf War. “In 2020, he faced new enemies of all sizes / The coronavirus and not a single stopover”.
The text earned him congratulatory messages from former sailors from this ship and other boats. The poetic tradition “weaves links between generations of sailors”, he greets.
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