two young gazelles lock horns and head-wrestle, then quit and move on.
The Futility of War [Haiku]
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Category Archives: War
Scarecrow [Free Verse]
Scarecrow, n. - that which exists
solely to evoke fear.
There are so many scarecrows:
global - the end of the world
as we know it.
societal - the end of the tribe
as we know it.
individual - scarecrows of the soul.
Scarecrows lead us into the worst
versions of ourselves:
The one who's stressed, and mean
because of it.
The one who imagines conspiracy
around every corner.
The one who sees threat in every
change & in every difference.
The one who wants an orderly world
of people just like themselves -
familiar, cozy, and lacking surprises.
Scarecrows even march us off to war,
and war should be the scariest state
imaginable --
death doled out on a random basis.
War should be the scariest, but terrible certainties
spur less fear than any old uncertainty.
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Metaphor & Misnomer [Free Verse]
"in the trenches" what a circuit that phrase has taken: from the Western Front of World War I, where the trenches were cold, claustrophobic places of mud and creeping mustard gas; harbor & prison for shell-shocked souls at wit's end to become used by businesspeople & politicians to describe metaphorical fights... but there are no metaphorical fights, they should be called metaphorical games games have winners & losers, but not the living & the dead & the dying & the disabled & the permanently disturbed it feels like a frivolous bit of linguistic creep as fighters now stand on cold, wet feet in muddy trenches in Eastern Ukraine talk of salespeople or grassroots political organizers as "in the trenches" misses the point that everyone in trenches is a soldier -- be they a salesperson in the metaphorical "trenches" of calmer days.
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War [Haiku]
war is in the wind; i hear its shrill grinding, but can't tell from where.
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Fields of the Dead [Free Verse]
It's a beautiful day
in the graveyard.
Blue skies.
Cool, but not cold.
The ideal temperature
to be an overdressed military man.
Do ghosts amble among the stones
on days like these?
I imagine most of these men died
on quite different kinds of days:
Rainy, cold, muddy days.
Muggy, buggy, malarial days.
The kind of day that just won't end,
but to fold into a sleepless night.
How many died,
not from spall or Minié balls,
but because they just didn't have the will
to drag themselves through another day?
from exhaustion?
from demoralization?
How many died under beautiful blue skies
on an idyllic autumn day?
I don't know whether
there're good days to die,
and even less whether
there're good days to be dead.
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Dogs of War [Lyric Poem]
The dogs of war are slipping. The ropes they are a ripping. The palms they are a bleeding, as citizens are reading of risks that led to slippage: of quips and of equipage, and how it wasn't expected, and courses were corrected, but still it all goes wrong.
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Tiny Tank [Free Verse]
Someone put a tiny, limp-gunned tank
on Danube west bank --
in Budapest, opposite Parliament.
Unsubtle symbolism, indeed,
but worth noting:
The might of violence
made feeble in the face of democracy,
and all that.
So true,
and yet so few
seem to believe it.
We seem to believe
that matching savagery
is the key to strategy
in opposing the extreme,
but then we've really just made more
extremism, haven't we?
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DAILY PHOTO: Slavín
Emerson’s Wave [Free Verse]
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.
Ralph waldo emerson, Self-reliance
Is there any angst that we will tumble off a cliff that we should have railed off long ago? -- Nuclear War -- I fear that wave has rolled onward, and we have lost that angst. Do we not fear: blast wave disintegration? fire that turns wet things -- such as ourselves -- into instant ash? clumps of hair in the hands of the neutron-cooked? If we've forgotten to fear such things, we are surely doomed.
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DAILY PHOTO: Indian Weapon Display
