The War Poets

The war poets.




If only poets waged wars instead of warriors,
And revolutions fought with rhymes not rifles,
Then no pale bodies would be broken in battle,
Or the innocent killed in cold blood like cattle,
No more ravens and reporters to rob and plunder
All those ‘victories’ that fools call their blunders,
No more would city streets where civilians sleep,
Be pounded into pyres of dust and rubble,
By jets that drone like wasps overhead,
Instead words would be the only weapons,
Deployed in the name of attack and defence,
And poems regarded as the mightiest battalions,
Arrayed in ranks to fight upon plain white pages,
Instruments of art waging far nobler forms of war,
Than that which has shamed man throughout the ages.




Festooned with bandoliers of ironies instead of bullets,
Hurling grenades of rhyming couplets, that stun and startle,
Instead of sundering limbs with shrapnel and high explosive,
Poets will mercilessly bombard the armies of their enemies,
With artillery shells of savage invective and vicious verses,
Where the only metres lost or gained, and the only fame found,
Are not in carved acres of blood soaked ground,
But in the lines of clashing rhymes and lyrical paens,
For the poet opens fire armed only with a pen,
And ink, not blood, flows in the struggle of syntax,
For instead of feeding hungry bullets into greedy guns,
The poet kills with a poesy, simple sarcasm and puns,
No more will troops be marched from mired trenches,
Straight from parade grounds and into deaths clutches,
For the line of fire that widows wives and kills fathers,
Will no longer await the fallen just beyond the wires,
The front line will be the war against lies and propaganda,
That the politicians and journalists plant as dark seeds,
In the killing fields and pages of their newspapers.




The hunting ground of the poet is the soul,
For his IED’s are made with well placed words,
That sudden devastate the enemies sense of self,
With a thundering implosion of bright insight,
That leaves the body intact, but the soul broken,
The aim of the poet is to kill the killer within,
And free the free man from his inner prison,
Leaving the will of the warrior wounded,
But the mind of the man, awake and pellucid,
If formed with skill and wisdom, words wound,
Far deeper than mere flesh, lodging deeper than bone
With shrapnel that cannot be removed with a scalpel,
Slowly killing the heart and mind of its carrier,
When it shifts deep within and crosses the barrier,
Travelling into dreams and daylight visions,
Crippling the conditioning that creates abstractions,
Turning the other side into machines and monsters
Fit only for the flies, constant culling and killing.





Beware the unarmed poet who sings the Glam Dicin,
For his is the dark power that kills from within,
His poems are a gaesa that will make him a king,
And humble all warriors who dare stand against him,
For a satirist is more dangerous than a wounded lion,
His words can bring down kings with secret laughing,
And his most dangerous dragon is a well aimed word,
That infects and pollutes the minds of all who heard,
As like ash upon the snow it stains with doubt,
The honour of a hero, snuffing the divine light out,
Raising boils upon the face of an arrogant lord,
Who in a moment of madness dared draw his sword,
For poets can kill and their very words can maim,
Humbling the arrogant until accursed by name,
So if wars are to fought and honours to be won,
Let poets take up arms and the battles begun.