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I have just finished watching the 2-hour documentary of the Beslan seige of last year. I'm at my computer, with my blog page still empty of anything I'm supposed to put in before the week ends. Harold Pinter winning this year's Nobel prize for literature is on my mind, and so is a poem he wrote about war:

The Bombs

There are no more words to be said
All we have left are the bombs
Which burst out of our head
All that is left are the bombs
Which suck out the last of our blood
All we have left are the bombs
Which polish the skulls of the dead

The war poems he wrote, especially the ones against the invasion of Iraq, won him the Wilfred Owen award last year. Wifred Owen is another poet, who wrote about his war experiences in the First World War. Pinter's war pieces would never compare to Owen's own ones, but poems like The Bomb can apply so easily to recent events like the Beslan seige, where over 300 people, about more than a 100 of them children, died.

(Harold Pinter used to call himself Harold Pinta when he first started out as a poet in 1950, seven years before his first play, The Room.)