war

February 28, 2023

AND TO YOU WE LEAVE . . .

Of course we did not heed
the warnings, what did they know,
and anyway we were sure we had won.

History is a poor teacher, that
much we have demonstrated again
and yet again, lessons never learned.

It is how we got here, how we
have no clear path to leave here,
things assumed lying in ruin around us.

We are tired now, old and no longer
able to fight as we once did, so we
must become the teachers, sharing

what we know, what battle plans
we used, reaching for those who
assumed it would all be provided,

that they needed to do nothing,
to sit by, to not participate, and now
to complain about the disaster.

We did not want this for them,
they, although we didn’t know it then,
were the reason we fought, and now

they must carry the battle or lose the war.

January 12, 2023

VICTOR

In our time
of never-ending war,
punctured by the briefest
lulls we now call peace,
someone, someones
more likely, will talk
about whom will be
the victor, to whom
shall go the spoils.
Bierce, that perpetual
cynic, reminded us
that peace was a period
of cheating between
two periods of fighting.
But no one pauses
to consider that
in any war there are
no true victors
only the victims
unwillingly offered up
in sacrifice to delusion.

First appeared in Jimson Weed, Volume XLI, New Series Vol. 25, Number 2, Fall 2022
https://view.publitas.com/university-of-virginias-college-at-wise/jimson-weed-fall-2022/

December 3, 2022

WE FIND OURSELVES

We are wholly innocent
we are wracked with guilt.
There is nothing we did,
but what is there that we
did not do, that we
should have done, that we
might have said so it would
never have happened, or
happened less, or happened
despite everything we did?

We carry our innocence
as a badge, we wear our guilt
as an albatross around our neck,
dragging us, slowing us,
forcing us to acknowledge
our guilt, plead our innocence.

In the streets of Ukraine
the war, the destruction continues
as we, the innocent, the guilty
can only watch in horror.

November 15, 2022

AND PEACE?

Santayana said, “Only the dead
have seen the end of the war.”
We have grown adept at wars,
no longer global in scope, but
ubiquitous in frequency.

Mine was fought in the rice
paddies of Vietnam, and on the
campus where we struggled
valiantly and vainly to protest,
and when that failed, in the heat
of Texas, marching about, going
thankfully nowhere, shipped
to Niagara Falls when the Air Force
could think of nothing better
to do with the likes of me.

I didn’t die, know several who did
and sadly know Santayana was right
for Bierce said it best, “In international
affairs, a period of cheating
between two periods of fighting.”

October 6, 2022

LACKLAND

They marched us to the middle
of nowhere, sweat running down
our backs, our olive drab uniforms
now three shades darker.

They handed us a rifle, an M-16
they told us in class, with a 5.56
round, it would tumble after
it hit its target, good for killing.

We lay on the ground, shouldered
the weapon, aimed it at the
target, a bottomless torso and as
instructed, gently pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened, which is what
the Air Force wanted this day
for we were here to know our gun
to befriend it, to cradle it.

Another day we would come back
to the range, take our weapon, assume
the firing position and hopefully watch
the round tear a hole in the target.

And on this day, our sergeant said
we had finally become warriors, then
he quickly took the weapon away,
never for most of us, to be touched again.

First Published in Half Hour To Kill, August 2022
https://halfhourtokill.com/home/lackland-by-louis-faber

September 29, 2022

APPROACHING NIGHT

Arising into night
the departing sun
tangos away with its cloud,
memories soon forgotten.

Other dancers take the stage,
now a romance, now
a war dance, feathers raised
in prayer to unseen gods.

Night will soon bring
its curtain across this stage,
the avian casts’ final bows taken
the theater will darken, awaiting
another performance,
a new script tomorrow,
but for this solitary moment
of frozen grace, it is we
who write the conversation,
our lines sung by actors who
know only nature’s
unrelenting song.

First Published in Half Hour to Kill, August 2022
https://halfhourtokill.com/home/approaching-night-by-louis-faber

April 7, 2022

MY ANNA

Along the banks of the barge canal
in the village park, a man
older, his hair white, almost
a mane, sits on the breakwall
feeding Wonder bread
to the small flotilla of ducks.
Tearing shreds of crust
from a slice, he casts it
onto the water and smiles
as they bob for the crumbs.
He tells them the story
of his life as though
they were his oldest friends.
My Anna, he says,
was a special woman,
I met her one night
in the cramped vestibule
of an Indian take away
in London during a blackout.
We heard the sirens and then
a blast, not far off.
She grabbed my arm in fear.
She was from Marlow-on-Thames,
she lived in a small flat
in the Bottom, she worked
days in a millinery,
and at night tended bar
at the Local, until the war.
She’s been gone two years now
and I miss her terribly
especially late at night.
A goose slowly swims over
awaiting her meal, she
looks deeply into his eyes.
How are you, dearest Anna,
it is not the same without you
late at night when the silence
is broken again by the sirens.

First Published in Friends & Friendship Vol. 1, The Poet, 2021

March 6, 2022

AFGHAN, ANYONE

Symbols have deep meaning
even to those so blind they
cannot see them, and our politics
have become wholly retail.

Any good retailer will tell you
that $19.95 is significantly
less than $20.00, a nickel
that swallows the dollars.

So we got out, and nineteen
years and 354 days
is considerably shorter
than twenty years we are told,

but everything blew up around us,
but I’m sure the politicians will note
that a dozen dead, while tragic
is far less than a baker’s dozen.

February 26, 2022

ENDGAME

He knew it was time
to call it a career when
they handed him the list
of what he could not say,
what terms were verbotten,
what topics were off limits.

Once upon a time he watched
the fight over textbooks,
how they approached sensitive
subjects like race, war, equality,
but he could teach around
whatever strictures they
would ignorantly impose.

But now whole topics,
entire aspects of history
were off limits, and he knew
he would not be an educator
but merely an indoctrinator and he
wanted no part of that.