FRACTURED PRISMS

Refracted lights allow us to see,
a spectrum of colors
of our self-righteousness,
and with certainty.
And so it is with moral conflicts,
that all begin with a clarity,
belying the underside,
of destruction, and pity, both
last refuges of piety.
Since creativity, wars of certainty
began but ended in despoliation.
Followed by peace and bereavement,
generation after generation.
History records twenty-seven wars
since seventeen-hundred and seventy-six,
and twenty smaller conflicts in between,
with casualties of 3.2 million soldiers,
mostly unforeseen.

Young people lost to nine generations,
not counting millions of civilians
caught up in the mad hypnotism,
of enlightenment, reflected in a terrible war prism.

The spectrum of primary 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 another million.

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

Now here we are seven years later,
as the hated not the haters.
Iraq and Afghanistan are today’s quid pro quo,
Twenty-Five thousand casualties,
and only ninety-three years left to go!