I’ve never been to war, it’s hell I hear
I somehow know it, in my bones I fear it,
And although I am a poet
I can find no words to paint
The pictures in my head
Of conduct far from saintly
Terrors none should ever have to see
or little children suffer in the night.
Mere might, however great, does not make right.
Why do they haunt my heart so vividly,
These visions of increasing mounds
Of senseless dead and mortal wounds?
What put them here, screening before my eyes?
What makes these ghostly images arise?
How can I witness horrors, feel
The sorrows of a warrior
When I have never been so near
To battlefields real?
Although while in the South United States
- Which warréd with each other
Once, brother killing brother -
I visited Manassas One and Two -
Ere the World’s Wars I called Great To End All,
And Aye-Aye Second ending with a Cold slap in the face
A race to pile up arms and conquer space
Ere generations and I both were Lost and wandering
Before so many undeclared "small" wars
Called Interventions, Police Actions, Rescues, Storms and Shields,
Crusades again? Methinks I’ve seen this war before…
It must have been the news on Channel Five
When I was only six or eight
I watched a war on TV live
In Vietnam the sun was rising while it set in my hometown.
I recall eating dinner (trying to - I never cleaned my plate at all)
While watching Hatred do such hateful things so graphically
It took my breath and appetite away.
That’s why imbedded units and controlled coverage
Now limit what the Yankee Networks show.
If you can’t see what happened to a village
You might believe the spokes who say "we didn’t pillage!
And rapes were not OK’d, our side plays nice."
But mother always knows somehow the truth
When weeping for her child’s sacrifice
(No greater than her own, if truth be told
For once the child was in and part of her
Consanguinous quite literally - her heart of gold
E’en now contains a drop or more of what was shed
By offspring far too young to die). "Oh take me in his stead"
The mother’s cry eternal "Why, oh why can’t it be me?
What need for me to tarry here earth-bound
My work is done." But no.
No sorrow greater known
Than a parent placing flowers on a child’s stone.
War, like hell
Reverses what should be
When a soldier starts to see
Innocence collaterally damaged far beyond repair
At least by humans, he or she over there
Can lose not only life or limb, but moral compasses as well.
Such monstrous inhumanities, all vanities,
Arise when callow youth are given firepower
Which corrupts
And absolute firepower can corrupt
But absolutely. Causes there have been throughout the ages
That most sages could agree were noble ones.
But that was in the time of hand-to-hand combat,
and that
Made it harder to dehumanize the enemy.
The modern distance and divisions
Propagandistic distractions
Can encourage thinking of the foe as animals, subhuman
And the irony of that is that
It tends to lead US to start sinking,
Stooping, acting, thinking inhumanely. Well,
I wonder if we can call any war
a just one anymore, or
is it all just only hell?
Dear Love, please heed the sound
Your humble helpmate’s voice
And guide all those in power to make a choice
To end adventures martial, so to take
These moving photographs so horrible, unkind,
Out of my mind.
Oh pray and pray and pray some more
A thousand cranes let fly
A thousand flowers bloom
A thousand clowns should brighten up the room
Ere one more mother’s child should die.
c. K. Markham McCarty 2006
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