At the End of Their Conquest

The conquerors looked around
At all their ashen mess
They stood there all quite silently
Not one to call them blessed

And from the ashes came the wail:
"We conquered our brothers, our sisters, our selves
We conquered our conscience and in our hearts delved
A dark little ship without oar or sail

For Acheron, Phlegethon, Cocytus and Styx
And most of all Lethe!
To memories nix."

Broken Spears

Dropping old tools;

Last of

Our recourses

Laid heavy so

In our

Letting arms

Matchstick shafts snapped

And scattered

Like sparks

To light warming

Fires in

Cold hearts

Never to burn

Eyes like

Molotov fear.

Forgotten, Forgotten, Forgotten

The air is dark with approaching death

And I hear it in the silence

Of forgetting and forgetting and forgetting

Wars, past and present.

Televisions and movie theatres

Add to the dull hum of silence

The sound we all make as we ignore

That which we thought we left behind.

It was not left to burn in fallen Troy

We did not leave it at Thermopylae

At Jerusalem’s gates

Or Rome’s hills.

We did not leave it in the dust of Carthage

At the yurt flaps of Khan

Or the bottom of The Channel

Gorged with the husks of ships

And the fragments of men.

We did not leave it on Abraham’s plains

The bloodthirsty dirt of Gettysburg

Or the long road back from Moscow.

We did not leave it at the door of the Bastille

The fields of Somme and Passchendaele

The skies over Britain

Or the waves in the harbor of pearls.

We did not leave it at Berlin’s feet

Or in the husks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

It does not wander alone in Korea’s no man’s land

It does not lie dormant in the jungles of Vietnam

Or the killing fields of Cambodia

It is not broken as Yugoslavia

It has not sounded its death knell in Rwanda

It does not lie dead in the deserts of Iraq

Or exposed on the hills of Afghanistan

It is not gasping for breath in Sudan

Or falling into a coma in Somalia

It lives and breathes forgotten

Like a crawling parasite

Behind the eyes

Burdening the mind of humanity

We forget and forget and forget

That war is not left on the battlefield

War remains with us

And in us

War is in our souls

Ode to the Soldiers

The bells! The bells, they toll for victory

Hard fought and won upon the heaping fields

Of mud scorched black by emptied armories

And blood of bodies brave who would not yield.

To them, to them they toll for all but naught

Who fought and died there in the worst of hell

Those dead; the brightest of the hope-lit souls

To walk the twilight of ’shrined progress fraught

With blinding pride and hubris great to knell

The gongs of war: the bells, the bells, they toll.

And throbbing now upon November air

A cry goes up and mingles with their sound

A scream of joy, perhaps, or bold fanfare

To ’nounce the end of war and loud expound

Relief for lengthy tension snapped at last.

Yet there among the joyous clamor bright

A sorrow note clashes ’gainst glad revel

Dragged slow through sky, its wake: a silence vast

Just broken by a wailing wordless fright

Of dreaded news now brought long to level

A heavy blow upon the grief-bent head

Of one lone mother who long wrote and hoped

To see her son return from war to wed

The girl who short would find her throat tight groped

By wracking tears and strangled falling moans.

The bells toll hollowly for past-known sons

When war yet won is lost when best is burned

On pyres of pride and greed that flaming groans

Beneath the weight of sacrifice in tons:

The lives not lived and futures never learned.

The bells! The bells, will ring for something bright

When men and sons will die for more than naught

They go forth bravely who for others fight

And stand upon freed lands that their blood wrought

Where peace will spread across a land once bound

In fears, despair and mercy lacked by those

Who led for gain to self and not the whole.

Those men who died in wars some base, some sound

By duty called decisive they arose

To fellows guard and reach the crucial goal.

The bells! The bells, still toll for mothers' sons

And daughters brave who gave their essence all

Against the threat and thund’ring of the guns

And raging death where they did lastly fall.

So lift the mothers and the dead sons high

And Daughters, fathers we remember too

Write fading names upon your mournful soul

Lest we forget the past in last goodbyes;

Do not erase that bleak November view

Of fallen souls for whom the bells, the bells,

They toll.

(On this Remembrance Day I dedicate this poem to all those who serve, or have served, in the military. Also, I dedicate this to all those who have relatives who serve or have served. Your sacrifices will not be forgotten.)