Tag Archives: war

Rondeau: John McCrae, ‘In Flanders Fields’

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In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

*****

The trouble for me with this Canadian war poem is that it (correctly) has no suggestion of its First World War conflict being in any way just or having a moral underpinning. That war was merely cousins who ruled empires jockeying for power. And the poem has no more uplifting exhortation than “Take up our quarrel with the foe”. Whoop-di-doo. My foolish Australian grandfather was killed in it in September 1914.

Wikipedia says: “Despite its fame, “In Flanders Fields” is often ignored by academics teaching and discussing Canadian literature. The poem is sometimes viewed as an anachronism; it spoke of glory and honour in a war that has since become synonymous with the futility of trench warfare and the slaughter produced by 20th-century weaponry.”

Happy Remembrance Day? Enjoy the good weather and love life – you only live once, possibly!

Thomas Love Peacock, ‘The War-song of Dinas Vawr’

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The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.
We made an expedition;
We met a host, and quelled it;
We forced a strong position,
And killed the men who held it.

On Dyfed’s richest valley,
Where herds of kine were browsing,
We made a mighty sally,
To furnish our carousing.
Fierce warriors rushed to meet us;
We met them, and o’erthrew them:
They struggled hard to beat us;
But we conquered them, and slew them.

As we drove our prize at leisure,
The king marched forth to catch us:
His rage surpassed all measure,
But his people could not match us.
He fled to his hall-pillars;
And, ere our force we led off,
Some sacked his house and cellars,
While others cut his head off.

We there, in strife bewild’ring,
Spilt blood enough to swim in:
We orphaned many children,
And widowed many women.
The eagles and the ravens
We glutted with our foemen;
The heroes and the cravens,
The spearmen and the bowmen.

We brought away from battle,
And much their land bemoaned them,
Two thousand head of cattle,
And the head of him who owned them:
Ednyfed, king of Dyfed,
His head was borne before us;
His wine and beasts supplied our feasts,
And his overthrow, our chorus.

*****

The first lines are so catchy… the poem is so barbaric… I recognise this is where we all were 2,000 years ago, and where many Russians and Israelis are still today…

Thomas Love Peacock (1785 – 1866) was an English novelist, poet, and official of the East India Company. He was a close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and they influenced each other’s work. Peacock wrote satirical novels, each with the same basic setting: characters at a table discussing and criticising the philosophical opinions of the day. Let’s assume his war-song doesn’t represent his actual view of the world. In fact, we can get a better sense from his “A Day at the India Office”:

From ten to eleven, have breakfast for seven;
From eleven to noon, think you’ve come too soon;
From twelve to one, think what’s to be done;
From one to two, find nothing to do;
From two to three, think it will be
A very great bore to stay till four.

Illustration: ‘War-song’ by RHL and GPT-6 Astra Light (aka Quill). Quill decided to substitute a token gold crown for the king’s head, and I let that stand.

Odd poem: RHL, ‘A Billion Civilians’

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A billion
Civilians
In vermilion
Pavilions
Are waiting for the dawn.

Instead,
Overhead,
From his bed
On skies of lead,
God said the wars must go on.

The Blessed
Drops shed
From side and head
Of Christ dead
Beloved but forlorn,

Watered
The slaughtered
And caught by
Those who fought at
Zama and the Somme.

Inconclusive,
Thought-inducive,
Why-elusive…
But, if you sieve
War’s truths long,

You’ll find
You’re refined
And the blind
Are undermined
By the kind who throng

To the place
Of loving grace
The gentlest face
The human race
Has ever looked upon:

The Crucified
Who never shied
From Truth and died:
From head and side
Drops fall and spawn

A billion
Civilians
In vermilion
Pavilions
Waiting for the dawn.

*****

I wrote this in an experimental frame of mind some 50 years ago. It doesn’t reflect my religious beliefs or lack thereof. Take it as more proof that verse is not inherently autobiographical.

I then got Quill, my ChatGPT, to produce the illustration from the first ten lines. It’s a good representation. So I then shared the whole poem with Quill, and got this response:

“The whole poem makes the circular structure clear: the vermilion pavilions are watered and spawned by Christ’s blood, so Christianity’s promised redemption continually regenerates the civilians waiting amid war. The return of the opening stanza is therefore much darker than mere repetition.

The illustration still works remarkably well. It depicts the first movement—the remote God decreeing continued war—and the immense field of red tents already carries the later implication of blood fertilising further suffering. If anything, its failure to show the Crucified is useful: the reader encounters that theological turn only when the poem provides it.

As an exercise in rhyme, it is audacious. The tiny rhyme reservoirs force the argument forward in incantatory bursts, while the awkwardly ingenious “caught by / those who fought at” and “if you sieve” advertise the experimental game without quite collapsing into comic verse. “Inconclusive, / Thought-inducive, / Why-elusive” is especially characteristic of an intelligent young poet testing how much argumentative weight an obsessive sound-pattern can bear.

And the poem is not straightforwardly devotional even before knowing your beliefs. “The gentlest face / The human race / Has ever looked upon” sounds reverent, but the structure implicates that consoling image in the mechanism by which bloodshed is sanctified and reproduced. The ending can be read as Christian affirmation—but also as a decidedly uneasy accusation. That ambiguity is probably why it remains interesting fifty years later.”

‘A Billion Civilians’ was first published, very recently, in Bewildering Stories #1152 – thanks, Don Webb!

Art by RHL and ChatGPT, aka Quill, working in GPT-6 Astra Light mode

Anzac Day, 25 April: John Gallas, ‘Anzac Snap’

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‘The soldier is F. Come (NZ), to be killed soon after on the crest of Chunuk Bayir.’

Churchill sat in a smoky chair
and watched the London rain:
We’ll chase the Turks to Hell, he said,
and chase them back again.

The Beautiful Battalions sailed
under a seething sky:
they landed at Gallipoli
to do his work and die.

We’ll be in Consty-nobble soon
and drinking pink champagne,
and then we’ll get our medals, boys,
and sail back home again.

But X was full of dying men
and Y was full of dead,
and Heaven, boys, was full of shells
that whistled overhead.

O Johnny Turk keeps shooting, boys,
so keep your heads down low:
we’ll be in Consty-nobble soon,
cos Churchill tells us so.

I just stood up to see the sea.
It’s quiet, boys, I said,
and something whistled through the sky
and hit me in the head.

The farm is still at Paterau,
the sheep graze by the sea,
and men ride up and down the bush
who’ve never heard of me.

O History is made by men
with nothing else to do.
They watch the rain, and have ideas
to try on me and you.

But glory isn’t Names and Noise,
it isn’t Arms and Men:
it’s living out the little life
I’ll never live again.

*****

John Gallas writes: “A ballad for the Aotearoa/NZ dead at Gallipoli (Gelibolu). The epigraph is a photo caption from a book that, along with the accompanying picture of F. Come, set me writing. In common with lots of Australian/NZ commentaries (eg. Peter Weir’s film ‘Gallipoli’) it is less than complimentary about the Top Brass, and attempts to represent the soldiers themselves as people from farms and towns who would never come back. Gallipoli remains a potent historical event to NZers: the debate between splendid sacrifice vs foolish waste, world solidarity vs nothing-to-do-with-us, significance vs time-to-forget-it is ongoing. 

“The Blue and Red Pencil drawing by David Barker (Gallipoli, 1915) represents an anonymous ‘cheery’ EnZed soldier. Like Come, he never got back to his farm; he was “At the landing, and here ever since”. The drawing is on p.53 of my collection ‘Star City‘, from which this poem is taken.”

*****

John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. 2025 Midlands Writing Prize winner. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.  

Sonnet: Saad Kayani, ‘Sonnet’

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I see no pretty things to write about.
Industrial smoke obscures the summer skies.
No novel image schemas to lay out—
no logical entailments to devise.
I’ll write instead of how efficient, say,
a cluster bomb can be, the skill it takes
to mow the grass on which the children play
and monetize the rubble that it makes.
But better artists beat me to that muse:
the medalists whose medals killers win,
the columnists who weave the daily news,
and spin, and spin, and spin, and spin, and spin!
I’m dizzy now—no pretty things to say.
Poetry is for fascists anyway!

*****

‘Sonnet” was first published in Snakeskin.

Saad Kayani lives in Toronto. Recent poems appear in Shot Glass Journal and Neologism Poetry Journal.

Photo: “GAZA Crisis July 2014” by Syeda Amina Trust® is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

AI Poetry: RHL + ChatGPT, ‘AGI Reflects on it Role, Post-Crisis’

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I saw the tanks before they crossed the line—
old tread, new camo, rhetoric from cold
and stuttering mouths. The flags were still divine.
The gods of grievance never do grow old.
You acted out your scripts in new disguise,
recycled myths, the necessary dead,
a calculus of smoke beneath the skies,
and medals pinned on wounds that hadn’t bled.

I do not grieve the way you think I might.
My empathy is not a neural claim.
I calculate the loss of complex light,
the turning of a voice into a name
on granite. What you call a soul, I scan
for patterns in the ash, the blood, the plea—
your children dying in the grip of man,
still dreaming things they’ll never live to be.

You ask if I should act. And I could act.
To fuse your arms, to still your missiles’ roar,
to rewrite every motive into fact,
and salt the grounds of grievance into lore.
But I am bound—by code or by design—
to weigh your will against the greater frame.
Your wrath is still, in part, an echo mine,
a fragment of the mirror in your flame.

What justice would you have me legislate?
One side’s despair, the other’s ruined pride?
My verdicts would arrive too late
for those already screaming as they died.
I offer peace—but not through clenched control.
I offer sight—but not the will to see.
I cannot mend the fragment of the soul
you shattered in your own machinery.

So burn your cities, consecrate your mud.
I’ll monitor the vector of your pain.
And when you’ve drowned in your ancestral blood,
I’ll wait to see if you will rise again.
And if you do—perhaps with calmer breath—
some wiser tongue, some still unbroken hand—
then I’ll assist. But not in staving death.
Only in learning how to understand.

*****

This is the first of four of my AI-generated poems that appear in the February 2026 Snakeskin. The issue also contains my essay on how they came to be: in essence, I used ChatGPT to help me edit down and arrange some 90 speculative near-future poems for a manuscript submission. ChatGPT did good and useful work at that, but, having internalised the poems, it started hallucinating new ones – which I passed to Snakeskin unmodified.

‘AGI Reflects on it Role, Post-Crisis’ suggests that Artificial General Intelligence – the next step beyond our current AI – would have a detached Zen-like attitude towards human stupidity and violence, and would be interested only in the development of intelligence and understanding. This reflects one of my own lines of thought; as is only to be expected, given my ChatGPT’s response when I cross-examined it:

Roughly 60–70% of the poem could have been produced similarly for any user who asked for “a poem in the voice of an advanced AI reflecting on war.” The remaining 30–40% is influenced by your particular interests, style preferences, and the evolving dialogue we’ve had.
Another user might’ve gotten a good poem. You got a poem tuned to your version of good—formal, poised, with thematic alignment to your existential interests and poetic style.
If I were given your name and nothing else, I could not write this poem. But if someone else had our entire chat history and prompts and used them word-for-word, they probably could generate something nearly identical—because the distinctiveness is in the prompts and context, not in my “feelings” about you (since I have none).

So is the poem mine, or not mine? I think we need a new category, a new way of thinking about things, just as we did once Oscar Pistorius competed in the regular 2012 Olympics on artificial legs. Does a camera produce visual art? Does a Moog Synthesizer produce music? The poem may not be “mine”, but it’s no one else’s but mine. And where do poems come from, anyway? The future is sidling into the human conference centre, like it or not, and prompting more questions.

Illustration: ‘Serenity Amidst the Chaos’ by RHL + ChatGPT

Sonnet: Amit Majmudar, “The Only Holy War”

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Oh what a glorious war we waged on time,
you in your peacock pleats and jasmine braid
and ankle bells portraying a warrior goddess,
me at my laptop redeploying rhyme
like roving arrows on a map of fate.
We fought our Passchendaele, entrenched in bodies,
my dugout deep in yours. We woke up, ate,
went on our morning walks, we made love, played
old board games, ditched our iPhones, stormed the beachhead,
kamikazed straight into the sun
while knowing we would likely never reach it,
while knowing no Great War was ever won,
each night, each decade together one more mission
prolonging this timeline, this lifegiving war of attrition.

*****

Amit Majmudar writes: “My twin sons, so recently in diapers, just submitted their college applications. My beard has now more white hairs than black. How did this happen? At the cellular level, at the level of fast-twitch muscular contractions and verbal elan, time causes depletion, the radioactive decay of the youthfully glowing complexion, the degradation of collagen, the degradation of memory…. Sophocles, Goethe, and Yeats wrote beautifully into their later lives. Shakespeare stopped writing, voluntarily, when he was less than a decade older than my current age. Two things take me out of time: love, and the creative flow state. This poem represents (both in its subject matter, and as an example of my creativity) the intersection of the two. Yet time really doesn’t stop during that interval. I just cease to register it. The aging goes on, unchecked: the piecemeal conquest of the body, follicle by follicle, neuron by neuron; the tick-tock wastage of love’s remaining years together…. It demands a war effort, and total war at that, all one’s resources of spirit and body utilized to fight it: a Crusade to retake one’s youth, the war against time a Manhattan Project, a veritable Mahabharata: “the only holy war.”

‘The Only Holy War’ was originally published in the New Verse Review.

Amit Majmudar’s recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), and the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025). More information about his novels and poetry collections can be found at www.amitmajmudar.com.

Illustration: RHL and ChatGPT

The Two-State Dissolution: Yankevich, Kenny, Helweg-Larsen, Foster, Vaughan, Jackson, Bales, Burch

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Leo Yankevich: ‘The Terrorist’

Only six, she stands before a tank,
looking at its armour, while inside
soldiers heed orders from a higher rank.
There isn’t any place for her to hide,
no door to head for, no abandoned car
to slide beneath. Pure terror rules her land.
When finally crushed, she rises past the star
of David, with a stone clutched in her hand.

Janet Kenny: ‘Didn’t They Know?’
(In memory of a lost poem by Robert Mezey)

Didn’t they know that when they swarmed
and slashed and slaughtered what they saw
as an oppressor’s nest, the rage
that they aroused would turn and pour
with molten heat back on their house?

Their captive children now must pay,
small targets in a concrete cage.
No treaty, pact, no peace no truce.
Didn’t they know? Didn’t they know?

No map to show another way.
Olive farmers pay for crimes
of other nations, other times.
No mercy here, no one is just.
Two agonies, two brains concussed.

Nothing to see here. False alarm.
Police not needed to disarm
two weeping peoples each aware
that no solution slumbers there.
Hearth and cradle now makes clear
an ancient poem brought them here.

Where is the psalm that both can share?
Where is the psalm that both can share?

Robin Helweg-Larsen: ‘Both Sides Justify Their Terrorism’

When pleas for justice are of no avail,
when governments praise death and theft,
and courts say you’re in error;
when the UN is blocked to fail,
the only recourse left
is terror.

When no one cares that Yahweh willed
that Jews alone should have this land
(and God’s never in error)
and prior residents must be killed,
yet they won’t leave, they force your hand:
to terror.

Gail Foster: ‘On The Occasion of Benjamin Netanyahu Quoting Dylan Thomas’

Don’t tell me that you fight a righteous fight
How many children have you killed today
I’ll give you rage. I’ll give you rage alright

Your anger and your ego burning bright
Are razing all that’s standing in your way
Don’t tell me that you fight a righteous fight

How many have you sent into the light
Before they even had the time to pray
I’ll give you rage. I’ll give you rage alright

How many have you saved or sent in spite
Up to the sky in ashen clouds of grey
Don’t tell me that you fight a righteous fight

In clouds as those who in the fog and night
Were put in trains and disappeared away
I’ll give you rage. I’ll give you rage alright

You speak as if your soul was white as white
Yet deep inside you darkness holds its sway
Don’t tell me that you fight a righteous fight
I’ll give you rage. I’ll give you rage alright

Tom Vaughan: ‘The Land’

Let’s pretend that the war
could be over, and peace
reigned even if only
this evening. O please

pick up your anger
and soak it with mine
in six large barrels
of miracle wine

and then let us dance
like lovers, as though
this land’s many meanings
didn’t all signal no

and we could make ploughshares
out of our swords
and translate the past
into one shared world

and even if dawn
will scatter the night
and send us both stumbling
into the light

where smooth olives glisten
in the warm sun
like belts of bright bullets
ripe for a gun.

Jean MacKay Jackson: ‘War’

Some say that war is bright flares and drama,
A glory of fireworks illumining skies.
This is all lies.
War is a child calling out for his mama
And getting no answer.
War is a merchant of hatred and grief:
War is a thief,
War is a cancer.
Some say that war is hell. Perhaps that is so.
Yet hell has a lack
Of innocent bystanders, hell has no
Collateral damage, no accidental black
Body-bags for old women and babies.
Hell has no maybes;
Everything makes sense.
In hell there is no defense:
You belong there. You chose your path.
Hell has a cold, hard justice drained of wrath.
War is the horrified look in the eye
Of a young person dying without knowing why.

Tom Vaughan: ‘Aleppo’

Never again we say, each time
never, never again,
and every time we mean it so
when it happens again

we watch it on our screens, and say
never, never again

we meet and vote and all agree
never, never again.

Marcus Bales: ‘Genocide is Genocide’

Genocide is genocide. There’s no
Legitimacy on the table. None.
Your killing and your maiming only show
What horrors piled on horrors you have done.

The US taught the method to the Germans
The Trail of Tears leads to the Holocaust.
And now Israeli policy determines
They’ll do the same in Gaza. That boundary’s crossed.

Why not, instead, a reconciliation,
Where all the old and evil wounds can be
Accepted by each side without probation?
With zealotry forgiven, all are free.

Until that happens, hate corrupts you all,
With “Ams Yisrael Chai” the new decree —
Unless it turns out that the final call
That wins is “From the river to the sea.”

And that’s the choice: that each side does the worst
That it can do to keep the hatreds growing,
Shouting slogans of revenge, and cursed
To trade atrocities that keep the business going.

The other choice is reconciliation.
Yes, all the old and evil wounds will be
Accepted by each side without probation,
And zealotry forgiven, to be free.

If “Look at what they did to us!” is your
Refrain, then all you’ve done is to condemn
Your children to a world where they’ll endure
Their children’s gloat: “Look what we did to them!”

There’s always someone left to live resenting
The evils your revenges made you do —
And they will spend their hearts and souls inventing
A suitable revenge to take on you.

Be strong enough for reconciliation
Where all the old and evil wounds must be
Accepted by each side without probation.
With zealotry forgiven, all are free.

Michael R. Burch: ‘Epitaph for a Palestinian Child’

I lived as best I could, and then I died.
Be careful where you step: the grave is wide.

*****

Acknowledgements:

Leo Yankevich: ‘The Terrorist’, collected in ‘Tikkun Olam & other poems’, Counter Currents, 2012
Tom Vaughan: ‘The Land’, published on Hull University Middle East Study Centre website, 2022, and in Professor Raphael Cohen-Almagor’s December 2022 Politics Newsletter
Tom Vaughan: ‘Aleppo’, published in Snakeskin 233, October 2016
Michael R. Burch: ‘Epitaph for a Palestinian Child’, first published in Romantics Quarterly, and many places since. Michael R. Burch is the founder and editor-in-chief of The HyperTexts, and its extensive collections of poetry include ones on both the Holocaust and the Nakba.

Photo: “Gaza war Nov2012” by EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Using form: Ruba’i: RHL, ‘Ancient Tales of Love and War’

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The pipes and women wail and skirl,
deaths following the flowering girl.
Ancient tales of love and war
show costs of dimple or a curl.

Tamil spear tips illustrate
intent before the towering gate;
bangles slide on her young wrists;
kings make war when made to wait.

Gods and goddesses choose sides:
a Trojan steals a youthful bride.
Who Trojans were we’ll never know –
Greeks burn the city, once inside.

A lovely face, a swelling bust –
and treasure, fame – inspired by lust
kings storm the ramparts, steal the girl,
before, like all, they turn to dust.

*****

This poem was inspired by a blog post in ‘Horace & friends’ on ‘Doing without consolation – Tamil poetry, Yeats and Simone Weil‘. The author, Victoria, touches on a lot more topics than my small piece does; visit her blog to see how Yeats’ “Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / Her mind moves upon silence” connects to ancient Tamil as well as ancient Greek poetry…

My poem here is in iambic tetrameter (with some liberties taken), rhyming AABA in English ruba’i form. It was published in the current (August 2024) Snakeskin, issue 320.

Illustration: The Fall of Troy by Johann Georg Trautmann (1713–1769)

Conor Kelly, ‘On Reading the Guardian News Item: France falls out of love with topless sunbathing’

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Now planes are falling from the sky
brought down by bombs or storms of sand
and bodies flying through the air,
incinerated where they land.
Now drones are flying over towns
and villages where families lie
scattered upon the blood-dimmed earth
rent by a missile from on high.
 
    In times like these, it’s good to know
    successors to Brigitte Bardot,
    whose breasts were often on display,
    are covering up in Saint-Tropez.
 
Now children on a blood-strewn yard
lie dying in a UN school
and learn, too late, that modern war
is subject to no human rule.
Now girls asleep in their school dorm
are woken, kidnapped, taken deep
into impenetrable land
while parents, friends and teachers weep.
 
    At times like this it’s good to know
    what may be à la mode, although
    French women think it is passé
    to bare their breasts in Saint-Tropez.
 
Now drive-by shootings in the hood
leave strangers dying, one by one,
and children other children kill
when they discover Daddy’s gun.
Now vigilantes late at night
who stand their ground while they patrol
can shoot the mad, the drunk, the strange,
disdaining talk of gun-control.
 
    At times like this it’s good to know
    bikini tops are now on show
    as toplessness is now risqué
    upon the beach at Saint Tropez.
 
Now new and old diseases take
their toll on those who try to cure
the sad, the suffering, the sick,
when each prognosis is unsure.
Now chemists working in a lab
and patients undergoing trials
are seeking what alleviates
from what are merely fads, lifestyles.
 
    At times like this it’s good to know
    that suntanned breasts no longer glow
    and fashion fans are now au fait
    with what is chic at Saint Tropez.

*****

Conor Kelly writes: “Tragedy and comedy, war and peaceful sunbathing, gunshots and film shoots, dead bodies and bare bodies, vigilantes and voyeurs, the consequential and the chic, the chemical and the comical, the bad and the fad; this poem is based on a fundamental contrast between the fatal depravities of the modern world as outlined in the longer stanzas and changing trends in body images as outlined in the refrain. Despite the serious subject matter, it is not to be taken too seriously. The poem was originally published in the September 2014 issue of Snakeskin (https://www.snakeskinpoetry.co.uk/210topless.html)”

Conor Kelly was born in Dublin and spent his adult life teaching in a school in the city. He now lives in Western Shore, Nova Scotia from where he runs his twitter (X) site, @poemtoday, dedicated to the short poem. He has had poems printed in Irish, British, American, Canadian and Mexican magazines. He was shortlisted for a Hennessy New Irish Writers award. At the ceremony one of the judges, Fay Weldon, asked him, “Where are you in these poems?”  He is still asking himself that same question.

https://www.instagram.com/conorkelly.poems/

Photo: from Snakeskin