War Sonnet
Is it not war that drives us to despair
That we will never rise above the mire,
The grim and festering fields of fire,
The smoke, the noise, the shrieks that rend the air,
From men we've sent across the mud to dare
The foe to take their lives amongst the wire,
A ceaseless flow of death that will not tire
Until we have no more, or come to care?
Yet if we found the means to end this game
To fix this dreary picture in a frame,
To paint it as a scene of love and bliss
Instead of blood and hate, would we think this
A better way to live our lives, behave?
That we will never rise above the mire,
The grim and festering fields of fire,
The smoke, the noise, the shrieks that rend the air,
From men we've sent across the mud to dare
The foe to take their lives amongst the wire,
A ceaseless flow of death that will not tire
Until we have no more, or come to care?
Yet if we found the means to end this game
To fix this dreary picture in a frame,
To paint it as a scene of love and bliss
Instead of blood and hate, would we think this
A better way to live our lives, behave?
Or are the ways of conflict those we crave?
(I posted the above poem a few years ago. It seems appropriate to give it another airing today.)
2 comments:
your sentiments (so well put) led me to browse the internet for reasons for human aggression. I read this by Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago.
"The main problem about war being `in our genes' is that some forms of individual aggression may be in our genes as products of natural selection, but war is not simply the scaled-up aggression of individuals," he declares. "Usually -- as in Vietnam and Iraq -- it is an enterprise enacted for political means by leaders who themselves are not expressing our evolved form of aggression. The poor soldiers in many cases are fighting because they have to, not because they want to.
"And even when they want to, their motives are often based on factors other than aggression."
We honor war veterans here tomorrow and we talk about sacrifice with such pride but few of us wonder WHY we are such aggressive and cruel creatures or more to the point, what we can do to better ourselves. Now why is that?
Nicely put.
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