Someone Else’s War
 
 
 

                                          Will de Kypia


War is different in a foreign country.


Ignorant of the struggle's context, its narrative,

you're like Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond.


Thoreau saw two armies of ants, one red, one black,

savagely fighting to the death for reasons unknowable.

                                                  ~

A burning bus, shattered windows blood-splattered from

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


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


The reply might be “Here, those bastards did that

to us because they're just a gang of terrorist thugs.”


Or “There, we did that to them because a strong hand

is the only thing those crazy bastards can understand.”


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


Your otherness distances you from these quarrelling tribes,

and trivial details distract you from their mutual brutality.


At the mall a car bomb kills six, maims more.


The weirdly polyjointed contortions of the violently

lifeless victims disturb you less than seeing one of

them wearing shoes you wouldn't be caught dead in.


An errant artillery shell strikes the school.

Next to a limbless torso lies a severed arm,

tiny wrist encircled by a diminutive watch.


Does the timepiece still tick on without its owner?


Lamentations for heroes fallen in battle lack gravitas,

the rituals of their unfamiliar creed having no resonance.


A half-naked woman beats her breasts cross-armed,

dips a scrap of cloth in martyr's blood, then raises high

the holy rag, ululating not grief but rage and pride and joy.


You admire her bare breasts.


Any war waged under a foreign flag is confusing.


This war is more, it's baffling. Even the antagonists

are not sure why the two sides continue to fight.


Could the children demystify their parents' enmity?


No.


The children were taught conflicting cosmologies

and are now constructing alternate universes soon

to collide in a new explosion of the same old hate.


Today you saw a man scrape charred human flesh from

a café wall. Like a palimpsest erased and rewritten until

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

                                                  ~

Wars is hell. But this is someone else's hell.


Blazing in a land obsessed with the glorious past,

consumed by a bloody and never-ending present,

resigned to having no prospect of a better future.


So you will return to your own land,

a place where wars eventually end.


Where the winners and the losers can hope

to live together in peace again, someday.


That won't happen here.






















                                      Tap the plane to go home.

 
Someone Else's War
Red Streak