Stanza 1
3. Does it rhyme?
1. Is the language here formal or
informal? Which words tell us this?
2. The looter is described as ‘one of
them’, how does this make us feel about
him?
Stanza 2 & 3
5. What does this line suggest about the
identity of the soldiers?
Stanza 4 & 5
8. What might this line suggest about
how they treat their victims?
On another occasion, we got sent out
to tackle looters raiding a bank.
And one of them legs it up the road, 4. What do the highlighted words make
probably armed, possibly not. us think?
6. What technique is used in this line?
Well myself and somebody else and
What effect does this have?
somebody else
are all of the same mind,
so all three of us open fire.
Three of a kind all letting fly, and I swear
7. What image is painted in this line?
I see every round as it rips through his life - Which words shape this?
I see broad daylight on the other side.
So we've hit this looter a dozen times
and he's there on the ground, sort of inside
out,
pain itself, the image of agony.
One of my mates goes by 9. What device is used in ‘Blood-
and tosses his guts back into his body. Shadow’? What does this suggest about
the aftereffects
Stanza 6 & 7
10. He is reliving the experience in his
dreams, what might this suggest?
Final couplet
12. Can you think of any other
characters we have studied who have
‘bloody hands’? What did the bloody
hands symbolise?
Then he's carted off in the back of a lorry.
End of story, except not really. 11. He mentions drink and drugs. Why
His blood-shadow stays on the street, and night he be using these?
out on patrol
I walk right over it week after week.
Then I'm home on leave. But I blink
and he bursts again through the doors of
the bank.
Sleep, and he's probably armed, and
possibly not.
Dream, and he's torn apart by a dozen
rounds. 13. Why is his life in his hands?
And the drink and the drugs won't flush him
out –
he's here in my head when I close my eyes,
dug in behind enemy lines,
not left for dead in some distant, sun-
stunned, sand-smothered land
or six-feet-under in desert sand,
but near to the knuckle, here and now,
his bloody life in my bloody hands.