- Non-Erotic Poetry
- War Diaries Day Twenty
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Click hereIn war they only remember the first five casualties
After that they only become a two second blurb on the evening news
No name, no history, just another young son or daughter dead
We struggle to remind ourselves why they are fighting
And after all that
We still cannot justify the end gains
How many does it take to reach an objective?
You can’t really know when the objective is unknown
Still they fight and die, fight and die
And for what?
An imaginary line that moves on a map to show what we have taken or lost
I wonder sometimes if politicians and generals can sleep at night
Knowing the decisions they have made
Have taken human lives and destroyed a thousand more.
Thank you to all who read and made comments on my War Diaries series. I hope you all enjoyed reading it as much as I did creating it.
Thank You,
pipedream_ink
- COMMENTS
LeBrozover 16 years agoA fine conclusion to the series that ought to give any thoughtful person pause.
Angelineover 16 years agoYour poem has been recommended in the New Poems Review thread on the Poetry Feedback and Discussion forum. Thanks for the read. :-)
Angeline
lorencinoover 16 years agoOne always struggles with the tension between form and content in deciding how to rate a poem. In my experience of reading your <i>War Diaries</i> I was always completely captivated by the message and neutral about the form. It kept nagging at me when I scored a five that there was no genius shaping the form and yet this did not seem to matter. The experience came through load and clear, so the form must have been appropriate if it did not dim the message.<br><br>There is nothing overblown in this entire group of poems; the anguish is adequately described and the reflective asides on the justice and point of the war are simply stated and never become a diatribe.<br><br>I also think that it is very important for the good of all of humanity that veterans speak their minds about the motives for war. There is a great deal of emotion around supporting the troops which makes it extremely difficult to have rational discussion around the validity of foreign military adventurism. When veterans like you question the justification for war it separates the politics of war from the ordinary human beings involved and thus makes discussion easier and more prone to be rational. I thank you humbly for this.<br>
