The Sin of War

Something roared.
Something cried out.
And, piercing the calm,
something cried back.

Where two brothers pass each other,
where two brothers come face to face,
where two brothers give and take in marriage,
on the open ground of life and death,
in the gulf of ruin and thriving,
in the gorge of foreboding and peace,
… wedged fast there,
something cried out.

Then one grain of seed,
while the talh and the savanna thorn spat heat at each other,
while the sorghum and the millet felled each other,
and, with nobody left to gather what they bore,
fed on each other where they stood,
pressed down past breath by the downpour of her own weeping,
cut a piece from herself and was herself cut,
and out of herself sowed herself.

Into that flow of blood and water
that had not yet burst forth,
where no one could say which was whose,
… she was set in the ground.

But the seed,
escorted by a shivering sun,
by a downpour that would not let up,
by lightning gone pale,
by a rain that burned as it fell,
slipped the clank and clatter of iron and old iron,
went past the angel of death,
and, a barren life on her shoulders,
there she was, come to the harvest.

The seed,
out of that blood and water not yet burst forth,
no knowing whose it was, or to whom,
no telling which way it ran,
came on her own
to the harvest, to be told apart.

But at the harvest,
when the seed gazed far off to her right,
it was a man, and she one hair of his beard;
when she gazed far off to her left,
it was the earth, and she one plant on it.
Dismayed, she fed on astonishment.
She wavered,
but joining one against the other was never in her.

With whom to lean, and where to lie in wait?
Where to come to anything, and where to cast herself?

But the wrong of that harvest, its ugliness,
it ploughed with the mouth of the bullet,
poured life out by the bushel,
picked the dying out of the breath,
reaped death with death,
threshed it on the backs of the young,
and toward dusk crushed the grain flat in dread.

When the seed saw
day and night become one thing,
foreboding and relief mixing together,
a world inside the world,
a war inside the peace,
trust, and betrayal at the back door,
she was dismayed.
And is this not dismaying?

The sinfulness of the harvest of war,
a mother’s tears for her child,
a house’s tears for its ancestral land,
the earth’s tears for its own earth,
when the tears flowed and flowed and ran in streams,
when the ground was muddied and drenched,
when it drove its tools in,
adorned everything … and stripped it bare,
how soon it bore shovel and mattock,
how soon it welled up shroud and bier.

And yet … how soon it is all used up,
and everyone scrambling for it,
all of us wanting it, all of us owning it.

War, and the evil of it,
when the harvest you never wanted ripens,
when its unruly echo knocks at your door,
that is when the sin of war decants sin into sin.

But …
against your wish, you serve it;
against your will, you go with it;
and oh … how you pray for it to go far off and never be heard of again.