As a history buff, War has always been fascinating to me. I mean sure, learning about war is cool and all, and video games from Battlefield to Total War are great platforms to have fun with gameplay and strategy. However, what often passes under the radar is the condition of the fighting man himself. The following are some of my poems about war and the men who fight. This is what I can only imagine War to be like from the comfort of my dorm room, and I hope that the time never comes when I have to experience such horror myself.
- Patrie (a Napoleonic setting)
- De Vaux (the battle of Fort De Vaux, Verdun, WWI)
- GI44 (monologue, American soldier, 1944)
- Letter from a Legionnaire (monologue, Roman soldier)
Patrie
Drums sound like metal, especially the snares when they sing discordant harmony with the flintlocks. The fusils of scared, tired souls whose buttons were gleaming that very morning whose bayonets glittered in the sunshine that broke through the cannon smoke. Mud and blood have a peculiar way of obscuring that deadly shine. They cling to the felt and hug the iron as if their lives depend upon it. Other’s lives once depended on it, when they existed. But they’ve dissolved into the trees, the earth, the sky, the breaths of comrades. A flash, and they’re gone. So stand in your lines men, present arms! Worry not that you’ll probably be fly fodder in two minutes, or at best on a stretcher in five.
De Vaux
Twisted spires of rusted iron claw
at the heavens above. Displaced, by
violent thunderous wrath that only
God can rain down upon mortals.
But we mortals liken ourselves to the movers
of heaven and earth: and heaven cowered
as the booming artillery shattered the silence and
echoed over the Meuse-Argonne.
Earth jumps in clods, you know,
but concrete shatters like glass and
fills one’s lungs with murderous dust
when the fort walls are pummeled.
A breach, a crash, nowhere to run
for the soldiers or the water. Nothing to
save them as the guns fall silent
so the men can begin to scream.
So walk over the battlements, ye mighty
o’er the cratered hills of Vaux,
pick up a forlorn piece of concrete
to show your friends back home.
GI44
They shipped us off in metal boxes,
filled with air, defying gravity through
buoyancy, across the endless sea
to the continent of my forefathers.
We fight in their war. The New World
to the rescue of the Old? Why do we bother.
My daddy ran away from this god-forsaken
place for a damn good reason.
Yet we fall in droves, murder in quintals,
like meat in a slaughterhouse, but we get a discount
cause we’re fresh, strong, we don’t feel
like what we’re doin’ is pointless, least not yet.
We scream, we cry, we push, we die,
to liberate folks that’ll throw flowers
at us lovely GIs and blow us a kiss.
We need those flowers for the graves, sweetheart.
The cigarette’s runnin’ out, the artillery’s gettin’
loud, ain’t nothin’ we can do about the stench and smoke
til’ the Sarge tells us to pack up, get up,
throw our lives back onto the Roulette wheel.
They shipped us off in metal boxes:
well, half my friends went back in spruce
or oak, god knows which one of those
will take me home again…
Letter from a Legionnaire
They came. A rolling, thunderous wave
through the Saxon forests. Their feet
pounding the very earth into submission,
their shrieks carrying the wrath of Mars himself.
And as the air pulsated, with my heartbeat in my throat
I yelled and braced, and thought of warm home…
Whistles blew, the shields closed,
the Neptunian deluge of men broke upon the ramparts.
They swung their blades with hell-wrought fury,
as our gladii flickered like serpents’ tongues.
We pushed and pushed until the sea of brutes
cowed and retreated into the sea of darkness.
Better them than the horsemen, I suppose.
A target materialises on my back in the Pannonian plain.
Inhuman speed. My soul screams to charge but
iron discipline holds me steady. That way is death.
This way is pain, but a chance at survival.
Some hard tack and rotting meat is all that guards
civilisation as we know it. Behind me, mother, you
knead the bread from the grain we eked from
the barren soil, paltry seeds of fruitless labour.
I shall fall. When I do, they shall swoop
down and take what is theirs by right of valour.
I am but glad that I shall fall before I see you in their bloody hands.
For I see premonitions of the Palatine in flames
and my heart cries out in stubborn anguish.
Before they smite me I shall cry:
Senatus Populusque Romanus!
Those were my four poems on war. Please leave your comments below with your thoughts and opinions, and any constructive criticism is welcome.
The Galley with No Name 