Ode to War, An unheeded cry of anguish Options

[Larry]

Ode to War

Earth's bones in long unending rows. Across a verdant green,
small cookie-cutter monuments, stamped by a cold machine
are marked with less than two score years. A litany of grief!
All led to death by generals, who made life's passage brief.

Young men's demise, we celebrate; their screams for life now mute.
Gunpowder’s scent rides with their souls from meaningless salute.
Long boxes full of memories decay as sorrows fade.
Sad children, dead before their time are plucked from life’s parade.

Thus, we bequeath to Mother Earth a flood of husks and gore
as we forget our yester wars and tred that path once more.
This field we plant with wasted youth. Death's pain, the only crop;
although a billion prayers are wailed. Will planting never stop?

Is there no end to strife and war? A futile exercise...
Freedom, I know, is treasure true but what of love's demise.
A million times a million years were stolen by old men
whose petty selfishness and greed sent kids to sate Death's grin.

Grey paranoid soured souls, fear filled for reasons naught,
unleashed their Judas inspired words to get their battles fought.
The dead are truly free from care; they are the only ones.
I'd rather live with peace and love than die for greed and guns.



-------------------------------
This was written nearly 42 years ago after I got back from Viet Nam. I re-read it every Memorial Day weekend. The world has yet to figure out how to live in peace.

Larry

[ace]

Larry:

Really, really fine and a great piece for memorial day. Your picture of he standing bones is a good fresh image.
I'm not sure I am clear on why ine line 3 you use the "two score" limit.
I like "yester wars" in line 10.
I feel like maybe this weakens a little bit in the final stanza.
Good job.

ace

[Larry]

Hi Ace,
Thanks for the read and the crits. The reason I used "two score years" in S1L3 is that the majority of the fatalities in Nam were young kids under 20 years of age like I was when I served there. I might have qualified that line by beginning it with "most" instead of "are". Thousands of them are buried at Arlington and that is what S1L1 tries to describe.

The last stanza, being the refrain, is used to summarize my feelings and thoughts on the reasons for and the futility and results of any war. I've looked at it for decades and still believe that if the world, throughout history, had wiser leadership, someone would have figured a way to alleviate the constant need for war and its resultant untimely death toll.

Larry

[Alan]

Dear Larry,

"The need for war" is a lie - all wars are CAUSED by various manipulations. Usually to divert attention from something else.

A fine write.

Love
Alan

[jgdittier]

Dear Larry,
I'll surely not fault the message and I'll confirm that I like the flow of iambic heptameter.
It is obvious you use care in composing and impressive that you wrote something of this stature so many years ago.
Nicely done!
Cheers, ron jgdittier

[Guest_ohsteve_*]

Larry, a beautiful piece about a sad time in America's history, so much useless killing and for what? And now we have all these young men killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, another possible Korean war, lets see how many more of American youth we can kill. I have all the respect for the troops, hell I was in for 23 yrs, I say lets make the damned politicians go fight.
Steve

[jgdittier]

Dear Larry,
Mark had hooked me on thoughts trying to understand the absurd and now it's dawning that war is absurd. Yet letting the last best solution, (David and Goliath) doesn't seem an adequate substitute.
Does it really come down to a choice between vengeance and justice and where does compassion fit? An eye for an eye, fight fire with fire or turn the cheek? Is man's mind just as incapable of such understanding as it is of infinity?
Cheers, Ron jgdittier

[Cleo_Serapis]

Larry,

Such a poignant message in this one - hard to believe it was written shortly after I was born. There are many snapshots in this that really ring close to my heart, one of which is this:

Long boxes full of memories decay as sorrows fade.
Sad children, dead before their time are plucked from life’s parade.

An interesting couplet - I like the sad image of life's parade now gone (in reality, how sad to bear). I'm not going to get into a critique tonight - this is Memorial Day and I'm just here to say I read and enjoyed this poignant outcry of emotion and metaphor.

I will say that my favorite stanza might work best as the closing one:
Thus, we bequeath to Mother Earth a flood of husks and gore
as we forget our yester wars and tred that path once more.
This field we plant with wasted youth. Death's pain, the only crop;
although a billion prayers are wailed. Will planting never stop?

Poignant write, glad you reposted for those of us "youngins" to take in. Your message is univeral 0 sadly some things haven't changed in the four decades since this was birthed.

Best to you,
~Lori

[Sekhmet]

Good Morning Larry, -
I have taken some time to come to your tremendous poem, probably because the word, 'WAR' in any verse stirs up, within me, such deeply planted feelings of revulsion. It is not only the lives of young servicemen that are lost in the, 'Old Men's' Wars' - there is the 'collateral damage' (What a lovely, modern, clean phrase that is!)
As a young child during the Nazi bombing of England in WW2, my earliest memories are of being regularly awoken, and taken, screaming, to our flooded bomb shelter - (a covered hole in the back garden.) while the sirens wailed out their warning of incoming bombers.
And then, crouching in the stinking dark, listening to the bombers droning overhead, and the thump of the bombs landing on the houses in our street, emerging, deaf and blinking after the air-raid; only to find the homes of our neighbours a smoking pile of rubble, and the occupants dead.
My husband was a young soldier in that war - he drove a tank, and was sent to India to prepare for the Allied invasion of Japan. The dropping of the Atom Bomb on Hiroshima saved his life, at the cost of many thousands of Japanese lives - something that has played on his conscience for sixty years.

The absolute truth in your line - 'A million times a million years were stolen by old men.' rings out with total veracity. If we are honest, we know that the,'Old men' subconsciously envy the youth of young men - and the most powerful of the old men will always find ways of disposing of those golden young men.
They have no pity.
My own belief is that, if a Leader feels that war is the only option - he should, as token of the strength of his belief, take his own life. It would be interesting to see how many wars were considered to be, 'inevitable' after that law came into force.
Your poem was full of fury at the waste of young lives - and rings true through the generations.
Thank you for letting us see this poem.

Leo