Veteran protest poet Attila the Stockbroker has written a poem honouring the memory of his father, a frontline soldier at the age of 17,  to mark the centenary of the first world war. His father, Bill Baine, died in 1968, when Attila was 10. In the moving poem his son recounts how his father, sick in bed, was spared from the slaughter when his comrades went over the top: “His comrades formed their line, then came the whistle / And then the news that every one was dead.” The poem quotes from Wilfred Owen’s famous ‘Anthem For Doomed Youth’, and also refers to the recent controversy over the remarks of education secretary Michael Gove, who claimed in an article in the Daily Mail: “The conflict has, for many, been seen through the fictional prism of dramas such as Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder, as a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite. Even to this day there are left-wing academics all too happy to feed those myths.”

Attila, who has been performing as a poet for more than 30 years, concludes his poem thus:  “And so some lines to spike Gove’s mindless prattle: / These words a sole survivor soldier’s son’s.” He has posted his poem on Write Out Loud. You can read it here