Of Warfare

Dedicated to three incredible, incredible poets: Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Joyce Kilmer.

The Trenches 

They held with horrid hell their lines 

Til shells dispelled their noxious fumes 

Then through the labyrinth there fell 

A myriad to Earth’s gray womb 

A thousand summers ere that day 

Those fruitful fields were green and bloom 

What once were luscious, lovely plains 

Are now a wasteland and a tomb 

-jwm

Of the Poem (A Brief Comment):  

I apologize for that gruesome picture of dead soldiers along that trenchbed, but war is real, and as disturbing as sights like this may be, we need to remember that this is what we do to each other.

I hate it- I can’t stand that we war. But whether it’s for remembering a noble cause (if such a thing exists), or acknowledging the inherent evilness of it, or even simply to weep at its existence, we cannot and should not look lightly past the fact that we war with one another, and that warfare is one of the most heinous, one of the most brutal and cruelest, one of the most unfortunate aspects of human reality.