Rayn Roberts
Poems by Rayn Roberts appear in PoetsWest, Voices in Wartime, Rattle, Rattapallax, The Sow's Ear Review, Poetic Voices, four anthologies and many others journals. In 2003, he toured the U.S. to promote, Jazz Cocktails & Soapbox Songs and The Fires of Spring a collection of Buddhist poems. He lives in South Korea where he teaches English. There is an extensive website at www.geocities.com/raynrobkorea
Unseen Stars Are Falling
Autumn's come slowly
cold moving in
like the northern Red Army
trees screaming colors
days shrinking sooner
into darkness--
It's like the whole world
falling to darkness
and some enemy of light
and love waits
to swallow the sun
but the innocent trees
know nothing of this--
I went into the wood
to look for that enemy
searched far, stood long
looking, but found no one
and nothing to fear--
It made me wonder
why our young are dying
and killing in Iraq:
Sons on a Republican altar--
What voice from what cloud
will call out to stop
The slaughter of these lambs
our daughters--
There's a war on, I said,
Half to God, half to myself
walked sadly over a ridge
granite and quiet cedars--
Back home, I laid awhile
to rest my body and
they were there, yes,
the enemies of love and light
everywhere in my bed,
They'd been hiding in my head.
An Answer to Why We Wage War with emphasis on
the indefinite article “an”.
There is war because many people are not well educated and few are enlightened. Most react to and follow the news hype, buy into it, are more emotional than reasonable and many are not aware of or in touch with their "shadow". They will not say it, they cannot admit it, but they actually want to see blood and killing in the name of "right" and "freedom" and, worst of all, revenge. They have stared into the patriotic light of nationalism so long that they can't see the primitive shadow of violence and hatred in themselves. When you look too long into such light, you cannot see your shadow, but it‘s there, grotesquely behind you.
Humanity is a long way from understanding and not buying into the "God on our Side/ My Country Right or Wrong" mentality; because many human beings are weak, fearful, powerless, confused, directionless, unhappy, shallow, pleasure seeking, mean spirited and petty and a war thrills them, gives them a temporary feeling of direction and purpose, power, clarity and pleasure. People enjoy killing, as long as someone else does it for them. War and action movies are as popular as the games were to the Romans. As long as death is packaged in plastic, clean, bloodless wrap, not all, but too many people buy it. If war is quick and painless & comes in a video box, we can eat our popcorn and participate in remote safety.
That is why so many young men go off to war with honor, pride, even elation, but come home broken spirits ridden with guilt, needing the nation to give them welcome parades and monuments to restore some sense of self when they know deep inside that in order to survive they had to become killers, and some, killing machines. That is why they are haunted by nightmares and night terrors and some suffer mental and emotional collapse. Many will never tell what they had to do to "win" the war. My own father, a Marine who survived WW II, has never told me what he did; refuses to talk about it, saying only, "It is too awful to speak of."
Why do we not listen to our old soldiers who carry the sad truth of war in their ripped hearts, who have witnessed the agony and mayhem, who followed their commanders' orders and slaughtered without question, whose voices rise more from graveyards than from living men to say, “There are no winners in war; there are only the bold & lucky few, who by Darwinian law, are alive but marred forever by so great an evil.”
The commanders are not usually hurt, get promoted and face us with medals. They give the survivors medals, pieces of ribbon tied to cheap metal. War is an exercise in futility because the violence & hurt lingers in the minds of millions only to resurface in our future after the calm we call "peace". We cannot create peace by killing those with whom we disagree. We perpetuate violence in the world by waging war after war. We say we want peace, but what we call peace is only the calm between two wars.
We must face and understand ourselves if we are ever to get beyond our violent impulses and instincts and become truly peaceful. We must learn to talk out conflicts instead of sinking into the violent states of mind that lead us to war, for as long as we continue to wage wars, wars will continue and there is no hope for lasting peace. That is, as I see it, the truth, realistic, plain, sad, and still unacceptable.
