Don't Go

Men killing and being killed
far from home
far from their mothers' loving arms
to be buried in lonely stony graves
swept by harsh winds that bring from afar
the tears from a mother's eyes
the cries from a mother's heart
cast into the open skies
sharper than an enemy dart

killed for a king, for country, for a half-mad dream
of wealth, of fame, of glorious name
killed as so many boys are killed
far from the hopes with which they came
hopes and hearts forever stilled

what use is it to say Don't go
young men always think they know
more than a hundred generations teach
more than the blood of ages can reach
more than a million mothers' tears beseech
Don't go, Don't go, Don't go.

The Coming and Passing of Wars

The Coming and Passing of Wars - May 1945

Like the turning of seasons
when in winter we cannot imagine being warm,
a distant memory, like childhood and innocence
the days that seemed impossible to see again
have returned

The guns and the killing and the madness have stopped
it's no longer normal to take aim and shoot at a stranger
misery is not celebrated, torture not excused, pity not mocked
and dazed, we think of peacetime problems again
and the time of blood and winter snows
seems like a long dark dream that never really was

except for the dead, the wounded, the killers, and the widows

And we ask ourselves
as our children will surely wondringly ask us
what was it all for?
was there not another way?
will the winter snows come again?

Snowbloodia

Serbian absurdities
tragic atrocities
black and blue bruises
bloody noses on bloody birthdays
nobody knows
Slobodan somebody
bloody slob of a nobody
now makes us all no-bodies
blood in the mud
so bloody snowy
no blood in the bloody bodies

Blind with the blood in your eyes
burning with the blood of your birth
ethnically filthed
your filthy hands are rotted
in pure blood
Slobastard Serb
may it cleanse you from this wretched Earth

Where filth is thrown
the foul shall follow
this stinking corpse filled mud
that soon shall swallow you
is purer than your sweetest dream
our darkest night.

** With sincere apologies to all Serbs, I acknowledge your sufferings, this was written in anger.
** It has been suggested that Milosevic, both of whose parents committed suicide, was an abused child.

Bosnia

The land of chalets and flats and mountain huts,
forests and rivers and valleys and such,
small dusty towns, villages lost in mud
in the land of snow and blood.

Summer and winter the war burns on.
The spring rivers rise
bring bodies with no eyes
in autumn they dry
the long-rotted ones arise
from their beds in the mud
in the land of snow and blood.

With hot rage and cold cruelty the men fight on
Revenge and anger and cold calculated killing
The red-and-white checks and the Chetniks are winning
their dead far out-numbered by our million civilians
trodden like the grass of the fields
once rainbowed with flowers
now lost in the mud
in the land of snow and blood.

By hunger and fever this war is won:
in burning ice and in blazing sun
people forced to choose sides are driven from home
to countries so like and unlike their own:
fields of bones in the mud
in the land of snow and blood.

The Naming of Wars

The Great War became the First World War; the Yom Kippur War was renamed the October War, a recognition that not only Israelis were suffering; already the Hizbollah war is referred to as the summer war, in anticipation of another round that seems inevitable.

We talked for all those long years of the Gulf War, the war in the gulf of misunderstanding and forgetfulness between such near neighbours, Iran and Iraq, so different, so easily confused in a Western atlas or gazetteer, where the gap between 'eraaq and Eeraan is hardly more than that between idiocy and ignorance, between their madness and our malice.

Suddenly, after eight blood-sodden years, and an indecent interval of arms sales and sanctions, a new horror unfolded, a new Gulf War, our boys fighting for blood and oil, sand and glory, trumping the first Gulf War, now banally renamed the Iran-Iraq War, something local, a footnote.

Another interval of indecency followed, more sanctions, blustering, posturing, new actors. Bush for Bush, Blair for Major, Saddam, always Saddam. A new Gulf War, the second, or perhaps the third, like rounds of fighting in Beirut, mocking our counting as they mock the ceasefires. And so the earlier war is renamed the Kuwait War, to mark it apart from Iraq.

Those four jagged letters, four wretched years, Invasion, Resistance, Anarchy, Quagmire, and who knows what more to come? And how shall we name this when some future nightmare supervenes, when Turks meet Saudis, or Iranians Israelis, on the bloodied fields of Karbala?

But Iraq is not a war; it is the land of the two rivers, of palms and fields and mountains, of Babylon and Nineveh, Najaf and Karbala, and above all a land of people, of families, Arab and Kurd, doing their best to kep pride in the face of indignity, to stay human in a flood of inhumanity.