(A War Poem)

Refracted lights allow us to see,
a spectrum that colors
self-righteousness with certainty.
So it is with moral conflicts,
that begin with certain clarity, but
belie the underside of destruction, and pity,
both last refuges of piety.
Since creativity, wars of certainty
ended in despoliation,
followed by a peaceful bereavement,
in generation after generation.

History records twenty-seven wars
since seventeen-hundred and seventy-six,
and twenty smaller conflicts in between.
Casualties were 3.2 million soldiers,
most of them unforeseen.
Over nine generations of young people lost forever
in the mad hypnotism reflected in war’s prisms.

The spectrum of war colors was stained ‘dread,’
in the fourth quarter of the Eighteenth Century,
when the Revolutionary and Indian Wars,
left forty-thousand dead.

The Nineteenth Century color was ‘Vermillion,’
after the War of 1812, the Civil War; and
the Spanish-American War, cost us another million.

Victories attained in the Twentieth Century
were “Bloodstained.”
WW I, WW II, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf,
and twenty-six other “minor” conflicts
cost the lives of over two-million more young conscripts.

Now here we are a Century later,
as the hated not the hater.
Iraq and Afghanistan are this century’s quid pro quo,
Thirty thousand casualties to date---
and only ninety-two years left to go!