Edwin Morgan's 'Gorgo and Beau', a poem commissioned by BBC Scotland (Radio), is in the form of a conversation between Gorgo, a cancer cell and Beau, a healthy cell. They debate human suffering. Gorgo is taunting and full of bravado: he doesn't know the meaning of pain. Beau, with all Morgan's experience of a cancer ward, knows suffering only too well:
'The ward lay awake, listening, fearful, impotent,
Thinking of death, that death, their own death to come.
The sobbing ended; time for sleep, and nightmares.'
But Beau is not without his weapons:
'In Celtic tradition, poets had the power
(It is said) to rhyme an enemy to death.'
And my writing prompt is going to come from the artwork by Bedwyr Williams, Before you judge me, Walk a mile in my shoes, which is one of the finalists (no.3) in the Beck's Futures artwork competition.
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