This poem is a meditation on war. Unless we have lost a loved one in combat, war is a spectator sport for many Americans. It is reminiscent of the first battle of the Civil War, Bull Run. The gentry from Washington D.C. ate picnics overlooking the battle field. They largely believed the Union Army would defeat the Confederate Army soundly, thus ending the Civil War in one decisive battle. I wonder if they choked on their food and drink as they observed the carnage of the battle, and watched their Union Army completely eviscerated by the Confederate Army, gathering up the remains of their picnic or perhaps emptying what they had eaten on the ground before running for their own lives, as the Confederate Army was poised outside of the nation’s capital?
We still love the carnage of war, unless of course, it affects us directly. With the exception of Spielberg, much of war is still just glorified entertainment. Whether it be movies, or television, computer generated games and so on, we picnic as we watch the carnage on our screens entertain us. It is only when someone enters our homes, or our school, our theater, our shopping mall, our concert site with a weapon of war and opens it up on us that we suddenly experience that which many in the military have experience. Let us remember in prayer those who have died in battle, not only in war, but in the war that is raging about us in our classrooms, our cities, our neighborhoods and in our homes.
MEMORIAL DAY 2018 (REMEMBERING BULL RUN)
War.
A spectator sport.
The gentry of Bull Run
settling on hills
overlooking battlefields,
picnic baskets opened,
food and drink consumed
while watching the poor
slaughter each other on
the ground beneath them.
Those feasting on the hills above
have little at risk, perhaps
making huge profits
at the expense of those
whose bodies are eviscerated by
gunfire, human litter of
entrails and limbs
scattered over the ground
of the playing field,
painted in the color of death.
One year later.
Ground once teeming with life
now teeming with death,
bones of horse and men
still unburied, still exposed
to the human eye,
bleached by the sunlight,
stepped upon by soldiers’ feet
advancing across the same
field only to add their
limbs, their eviscerated bodies
like ragdolls, scattered
across the ground,
their bones piled upon
the bones of their ancestors.
What were they thinking
as they entered into combat,
to be one moment living, breathing,
only to awaken in the darkness
far beneath the ground?
We still play with human lives,
war glorified gaming by
chicken hawks occupying
high places in government posts.
We still eat our picnics
entertained by the death
of others, whether in a
movie theater, on television,
on a computer screen,
watching human beings
slaughter each other
for our own amusement.
Safely watching the slaughter
unless someone with an AR-15
enters our theater, our living
room, our study, and
we discover that our own
bodies are not immune
to the bullets
that scatter our limbs,
our entrails about
our blood painting the
floor, walls and ceiling
in death’s color.
We join our lives to
those lives with which
we played, to find
ourselves alive for a moment
suddenly entering into darkness
the ground piled above our heads,
awaiting the Second Coming.
© 2018, Robert Charles Wagner