Half a Lion

 

Life's so treacherous. One moment you're lost in a carnival of delights, with poignant childhood memories, the flashing wishes of puberty, all that sentimental candy-floss. The next, it leads you somewhere you don't want to go. Somewhere damp and cold, filled with the ambiguous shapes of wishes unfulfilled. So when you find yourself facing that incoming anxiety of a life barely lived, wondering where all the time went. Remember there's always books. Books are the emergency portal. You can just step in, and embrace all those beautiful things you wished to enjoy. You can experience a thousand lifetimes, one page at a time.

Experience a new world with HALF A LION for a thunderous adventure.

Dulce et decorum est

 

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

By Wilfred Owen