soldier

December 2, 2006

 

nextofkn3.jpg

 

no one wants to say
a soldier died in vain

but until there are no soldiers
we have all died in vain

 

 

Posted in family, Iraqathon, peace, Poetry, violence, war | 5 Comments »

5 Responses to “soldier”

  1. twitches Says:

    December 3, 2006 at 10:19 am

    How true, how true – we make way too many damn mistakes in this world because we refuse to admit fault, or error.

    Reply
  2. Ellen Says:

    December 3, 2006 at 10:25 am

    that’s very thought provoking…

    Reply
  3. Jules Says:

    December 3, 2006 at 10:56 pm

    I know so many people who’ve been forced to support a war or ‘peace-keeping mission’ out of the love they have for their father/son/brother…kind of sad in a lot of ways.

    The 2nd stanza is what really gets to me and like many of your poems, causes me to wonder what I’m doing to make things better.

    Reply
  4. Anonymous Says:

    December 21, 2006 at 10:28 pm

    A questioning piece. Your thought that until somebody achieves peace, all death will not have fixed anything is very perceptive, and well expressed.

    Reply
  5. qazse Says:

    December 21, 2006 at 11:40 pm

    Thank you for commenting. It is a dilemma I have grappled with for years. So often we rationalize the continuance of war by invoking the memory of those who have died – resolving that they will have died in vain if victory is not attained. I have always rejected that assertion but was unable to articulate a point of view which encompasses all wars and all their dead. Is the death of a Lakota Sioux killed at Wounded Knee less significant than the death of a Marine killed on the beach at Iwo Jima. Does being on the losing side make the difference? Absurd. Both their deaths are to be mourned and neither is more noble than the other. And they will both be in vain until their death has led to the end of all war, not just this war or that war.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: