hello and thank you for sharing this draft! i think you've hit upon a really rich and interesting conceptual seed…
i really love poetic works that respond to atrocity by deconstructing some kind of clichéd language. there's a few examples i can think of… the first that came to mind was Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, a book which responds to the 1781 mass murder of enslaved Africans aboard the slave ship Zong by tearing into the legal documents, the constructions and clichés of legalese, from the insurance case that follows. here are a couple links to some excerpts. and this is the legal document that Philip is deconstructing
another example that came to mind was Disaster Suite, a poetry collection by Rob Halpern responding in large part to the wreckage of hurricane Katrina and the atrocities of the Bush administration in the United States, borrowing and plucking from government reports, radio and tv broadcasts and the clichéd speech surrounding "natural" "disasters".
probably the most classic in this field is "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats. Yeats was responding to the senseless violence of the first world war by flipping imagery from the biblical Book of Revelation on its head…
not a poetic work, but i'm also reminded of a photography exhibit i saw at the Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam by Giath Tata called Becoming a Ghost. the artist is from Syria, and the photography in the installation largely consists of screenshots of the video game PUBG: Battlegrounds. it's in large part about the strange popularity of PUBG in Syria and the ways in which games about war respond to and interact with circumstances of real war, death, and despair like the Syrian Civil War.
something you'll notice is that all of these works are responding to a specific atrocity rather than atrocity in the general sense. i think this is something your poem would benefit from too, as right now you risk turning "the horrors of war" into a genre cliché itself. what is the horror you are actually responding to? how does it feel to you, as the author responding to it? what is your personal relation to the event of atrocity?
Philip has legal writing, Halpern has the speech of radio broadcast, Yeats has the awe of the Book of Revelation, and Tata has the design of digital battlegrounds. more to the concept of your poem, i think you should absolutely explore a deconstruction of the casual language of war as deployed in board games and in chess!! i want to encourage you to really delve deep into this, be daring about it! there's a very rich linguistic world surrounding chess and its metaphors; you might find inspiration listening to commentated chess tournaments, maybe even doing some light research on chess and war metaphors (some interesting stuff about the Great Game and the cold war in there!)… maybe there's a chess match that really inspires you—what happens to the white king's pawn, or the black queenside knight's pawn, in that match…?
i hope this isn't discouraging! my point is that you should figure out what really drives you towards these themes, what gives you a passion for pawns. for a first poem, this is an excellent start; you have a great sense of rhythm and meter, and i really get an impression of war drums, rolling and intensifying beats, and indeed hoofbeats, from the way you've constructed the piece so far. i think that's something to absolutely keep thinking about as you develop this further… the tempo of a chess match, the intensifying speed as opponents run out of time, the call-and-response…? it might even end up that the poem isn't really about the horrors of war at all, but about fantasies of war surrounding chess, perhaps to do with the masculinism of the chess world…?
depending on what motivates you, you could develop this piece a LOT of different ways. i hope this is useful! i'm excited to see where you take this :>
