Small Wars

Once
it was war,
now only
skirmishes,

small wars,

enrage
the world.


Today,
silence haunts us,
as if phantom peace
bled into the killing fields

and we no longer
die in battle,
hand to hand.


We die
in corners now,
cabbage-patch corpses,
passing innocents

hollowed out
by accident, hostages
to fortune’s combatants.


No-one wins
in the small wars,
uprisings, insurrections,
blowing over in the night

long before dawn,
leaving behind debris
and bewilderment.


Small wars
grind the world to cinders,
pettiness and misery
in the blank stares
of the destroyed.

© BH, 2021

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Time for a war poem. Still too much of it about. They try to fool us - too far away, too small, deterrence works for the big ones. But still the displaced are running, coming in their boatloads and we do nothing about the cause of it all. Small wars in forgotten places. Small hands in power wringing themselves. But the misery is never small. Nor the smoke and the fire of all that burning.