Will de Kypia

                                                

War is different in a foreign land.

You're like Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond

watching two armies of ants, one red and one black,

battling savagely for reasons incomprehensible to him.

                                                ~

A burning bus, its windows splashed scarlet from within.

All around, chaos. Lights, screams and sirens, bodies.

“Where?” you ask, staring at the screen of carnage.

“Here” they might say. “The enemy attacks our women

and children because those bastards are cowardly thugs.”

Or “There. We slaughter the enemy's wives and his kids

because even those bastards can't ignore butchered kin.”

And sometimes “No, no, that's someone else's war.”

Otherness distances you from these quarrelling tribes

and trivial details distract you from their ruthlessness.

An artillery shell strikes an elementary school.

Beside a limbless torso rests a severed arm, the

tiny wrist still encircled by a diminutive watch.

Does the timepiece tick on without its owner?

At the market a car bomb kills six, maims many.

The polyjointed contortions of the mangled

victims are less troubling than seeing corpses

wearing shoes nobody should be caught dead in.

And the rituals of an alien creed have no resonance.

Lamentations for the fallen warriors lack gravitas.

After one brutal firefight, a weeping and half-naked

woman beats her bare breasts. Then she dips a scrap

of cloth in martyr's blood, raises high the sacred rag,

and ululates not grief but rage. And pride. And joy.

You admire her bare breasts.

Wars waged under a foreign flag are always

confusing. This war is more, it's baffling. Even

the antagonists cannot explain why it continues.

Perhaps the children could demystify

the origin of their parents' dispute?

No.

The children were taught conflicting histories

and now construct alternate futures that will

soon meet in a new collision of old enmities.

                                                ~

In any land, in every land, war is hell. This

is someone else's war, someone else's hell.

Blazing in a nation haunted by its storied past,

ravaged by a madly self-destructive present,

resigned to an eternity of perpetual strife.

                                                

Today you watched a man scrape charred human flesh

from a café wall. A palimpsest erased and rewritten till

all meaning was lost, an apt symbol of the nation's soul.

Tomorrow you will return to your own country.

A place where wars eventually end, where the

victors and the vanquished may one day live in

peace again, together. That will not happen here.