A too short a write on such a man, but a portrait none the less.
A little known fact about the great man:-
He was a POW in Sth Africa where I believe he was a correspondent for a newspaper, he escaped by swimming the Vaal river and from there returned to the UK, where the rest is published history..
I would have loved to sit and talk to him but we were worlds apart and I was only 23 when he died.
I look forward to reading more of your works,
Yours Ian..
http://www.encounter.co.za/article/23.html

Very good write and subject. Sorry to say the entry is too late for the June contest. Contests always end about three days before the end of each month so the judge has a bit of time in making his/her decision. I hope you will be entering future contests.............stan (contest director)

He was a prolific author writing several large/detailed history works among other things.

I the reader am left with a little itch after reading this. I am scratching it, but this one I fear I'm quite getting. As a yank which of course knows of the well deserved sainthood of Churchill, I'm still not as close as the other commentators on the other side of the pond.
Firstly on the technical The poem is easy to read, has two comas and one period..i would just say I personally prefer all or nothing, but not sometimes. Punctuation is one of our tools as Snow once brought out, and I now agree. But to half use it i think is less effective.
I was able to connect to an inner logic in the first 4 stanzas, and the then the last asks me to put a lot together. It introduces Nature, and asks the reader to connect butterfly prayer and dance, all not previously felt (other than perhaps "prayer")
I couldn't get there with what I had previously read. They are 3 unique images to put together, so they leave me with that itch to know more.

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Not infrequently i write a line,image or stanza that I just have a gut love with. I like the way it sounds, i like the way it feels. I leave it there and work around it, i try to get a way to get the rest of the poem to accept this particular image and justify it. Sometimes it sets you off course and you loose track of the central theme of the poem. But most often I leave it for a while, knowing it has a vagueness that I feel but that has something that you just "like"...more often after working with it a few days, or longer, i am able to cut it or change it, sometimes just a single word will do it. It takes courage to accept that to make a better poem you have to abandon or change this particular image/line etc to get a better poem.
It wasn't probably only the sound of the last stanza you liked, it was the "feeling" that the words connected to you, (as you explained the dragonfly and that Bradbury I think it was, the story about the smallest event in the past will drastically alter the future, even a dragonfly...)
So i think this is just part of our craft, like a painter or composer tweaking his work when he can come fresh to it, and not so emotionally attached to certain passages. When the time is right...

that this wasn't posted before the end of the contest! It definitely would have had my vote.
Very nice portrait of the man, the legend. ~ Geezer.
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