5887. WORLD WAR I

WORLD WAR I
(lying, one-sided man)

One hundred years of age  -  now past yet

almost to the day  -  men were up and fighting,

and not for the world and not (quite) over

nothing at all. It was, surely, a different time,

when different things mattered. For one :

there was no crescent and the only moon

was in the sky. That sky, the one coming in

over battlefield trenches to gift wrap the carnage

and screaming. Horses and men alike, wailimg.

The forceps of this operation were always unclean -

yet the doctors still cut away; muscle and limb,

flesh and bone, mo matter.

-

I have not now shoulders to carry this weight  -

no knowledge on my own of cannon or armament,

of the recoil or the trudge, nor the tug of the

fiery bit grabbed tight in a horse's mouth by fear,

which I am sure they experienced as well.

-

Not ever want to walk the European woods where

so many thousands died, nor even those well-trod

paths of Gettysburg or Spotsylvania here : another

place, another war, the same intention that I abhor.

Stateside places where the like took place. ("I'm

carrying these dead from place to place. I must

leave now, without a trace.")

-

John Brown, Nat Turner, Mary Chestnut, Isaac 

Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, 
Rupert Brooke, Erich Maria Remarque; 
take your pick, you lying, one-sided man.