War Will Come

I don't do poems often, but I'm feeling it today

You can dream of peace, but the war will still come to your bed.

If your heart overflows with love for your neighbor,

The war will still slit your throat

In front of your children

And livestream to followers

Who cheer your blood

And mock your children’s tears

And then the war will kill them too.

You can keep only joy in your heart - and you should

But the war will still break your arm

From the torque of twisting

Behind your back,

Shove you to the ground

And you will hear others die in a line,

Bullet by bullet, closer you hear them slump and fall

and then -

And so ends

your one life on Earth

Which you tried to make the best of

Which you tried to do good with

But you’re gone.

And that’s if you’re lucky.

Pray you are lucky.

Pray the war shoots you dead

Or crushes you to death in your own bed

When your building collapses

Under rocket fire

And not that war drags you by your hair

For “interrogations”

where bitter boys whose friends have died

Exact revenge on your softest mortal parts

Deem you worthless

And end you

With the contempt of a farmer shooting a rat

Who got lost in the compost.

War is Hell, yes, if Hell is Other People, Lord Please

Grant it swiftly: let impersonal shrapnel

And concussive force

Come without a human face,

Come without eyes so filled with hate

So determined to hurt.

Those who want war are so few. But those who die could form battalions,

Could form vast legions of the innocent dead,

If these armies could rise and scream for peace,

How they would howl! Their righteous rage

Would silence the shouts of angry guns, the children

With knives for tongues, their hearts replaced with live grenades

What if the bombs could transform into schools?

If bullets could change into food?

Knives become medicine to ease the pain.

But we no longer live in the age of miracles,

If ever we really did.

And that last livestream could have been you.

Someday, it will be.

Someday the war will come for you too.