RHL, ‘On Disrespecting Ancestors’

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I disrespect my ancestors fighting in wars,
Europeans fighting Europeans, blame without cause;
my English grandfather killed fighting the Germans,
my Danish uncle executed for killing with Germans,
my earlier German ancestors fighting the French,
my French ancestors fighting (and marrying) the English…
and the cause of the wars always indefensibly wrong.
Why should anyone glorify them in song?
Pride, greed and stupidity – these are the drivers of war.
I turn my back on all of them, stand on the sea shore,
marvel at wind and wave, at sun, moon and stars,
despising, ignoring, forgetting their idiot wars.

*****

I’m so sick of Putin, Netanyahu… and Bush Jr, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair… war criminals, the lot of them. But they’re the products of our genetic makeup as social animals, dividing everything into “us” and “them”, and then through crafty hysteria and massively organised mob violence, grabbing everything they can for themselves.

Anyway, this semi-incoherent rant of a poem was published in the current Amsterdam Quarterly, and editor Bryan R. Monte wanted one change in my submission: to change the last line’s “ape-idiot wars” to “their idiot wars”. As usual, I acquiesced. Also as usual, I’m not sure whether it is a good suggestion or not. Apes figure in a lot of my verse, as being an underlying reality of humans, essential to acknowledge, equally essential to try to control. In the context of my other work, I think I prefer “ape-idiot”.

Photo: “War of the Planet of the Apes Poster 2671” by Brechtbug is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

2 thoughts on “RHL, ‘On Disrespecting Ancestors’”

  1. Nell Nelson

    I like ‘ape-idiot’ wars, except perhaps apes in general have more sense and mainly don’t make war. and certainly don’t make weapons. Nothing does war as consistently and pointlessly as human beings. However, I relate to your rant. Indeed, I like it. Except I do think the wars generally weren’t made by our relatives. Our relatives were pawns in a game, and the game is played by a few, generally male, individuals who are determined to wipe out large numbers of people and exploit greed and desperation in order to stockpile their own power.

    Our default is surely social. We mainly help each other if left to get on doing that. But with all our intelligence, and all our poetry, we have never worked out how stop power-hungry individuals making wars. All we can do is work out how to fetch dust from the far side of the moon.

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    1. Robin Helweg-Larsen Post author

      Thanks for the comment, Nell – I’m very much in agreement with you.

      We’re a strange species, and our strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. Percentage-wise, warfare and violence seem on the decline, century by century… but technological innovation offsets a lot of that…

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