By Design
And
Yes
The wars go on
And nature matches us
For blood
If not intent
While nature
Is indifferent
But our
Destruction’s will
And
You know
That’s it
It’s will
And will you not
C L Couch
Photo by Carl Kho on Unsplash
We Want to Make This Classic
Two years
Plus three months
Two wars
The ones we know about
Who are the combatants
How much material
Is left
To each side
How much longer
Even supplied
By the bigger thugs outside
Who claim
Defense defending
How much robbing
Peter
To pay Paul
And then Paul
Demands more and more
Of Peter
And it’s us
Is the idea
All us
We lose
We run down
We run out
We manufacture more
To say
It’s good for the economy
While the vaults in
Hell
Or waiting by the river Styx
Are the only things
That are full
And this become our legacy
We lose
Things from the Earth
That cannot be restored
Life in which
We had only given
Love
And there is less
The surplus population
Whom did we not need
And did we push them
Toward the front
Uriah-like
Of course
We wish it over
We wish them done
So we could walk across the fields
And say
This happened here
But statues
And they are meaningful
Fly flags
The same
By force
A fallow field
Unchanneled water
And who knows what
Congeals inside
Our natural
And plastic substances
To raise
Hate
Or something else we hide
Ongoing tries
For greed
Until we say
There
Someone made money
Out of this
Someone got a bit of power
Well
The illusion of it
Anyway
But that’s the best we have
In shadowlands
Expanse
There is the sun
At last
It will rise into the clouds
Maybe into a day
That’s only gray
Until the setting hour
When all these lines of yellow
Turn toward red
Then blue
Then black of night
It happens all the time
And is not
What’s happening
There are orbits
There are rings
Of different shapes and sizes
There are fields of gravity
There is magnetism
We try
To ken it all
To suss the meaning
In the measure
Or get a damn fine story
Out of it
Feature
Human interest
Sci-fi tome
That tells us where we’ve been
And where fancifully
We might be going
Out of these rounded places
Into an
Unbounded expanse
With only our imagination
For a shield
C L Couch
Photo by Krisztian Matyas on Unsplash
(x = space)
x
x
Wars that Cannot End All Wars
(on D-Day citing Second, other wars)
x
I can’t imagine
All the dead and dying on
That day
I won’t see or hear
Private Ryan
(or
by the way
Titanic)
I’ve known some injury and
Death
From crashes and
From cancer
The
Suicides
By people I have known
x
Sardined into a craft and then
The craft
By planes above
Or guns on shore
Explodes
On its way
To shore
Or those who leave
The boats
And are cut down
Unused guns
Held
Grenades
At hand
x
By the numbers the
Campaign
Was successful
In that the Allies
Overwhelmed the beaches
Finally
Finally
The parts once come together
A hold by hand
As far as
The living and the dead can
Hold
A military grasp
On the edge of Europe
x
A return
As when
MacArthur would return
An axis away
To the Philippines
x
Military plans
And executions
When it’s
Time
We go
x
Citizen expectations
Change
The accepted loss
In Desert Storm
Was zero
(under two
hundred
died)
Though we lingered
In Afghanistan through
Presidents
The war on terror
By the numbers
And at home
x
These were their homes
The beaches
On into
Farms and towns
War anymore
Is always a home
Matter
Your home
Or mine
x
Imagine that
And live it in
Ukraine
And all the burning places
That could be called
Without PR
Sites
Homes
For war
x
Trenches
Chlorine gas
Same place
Years before
That is
France
Greater numbers next
Nuclear
Numbers
In Japan
Winning
Losing
Graves attest
x
Mostly
We try
Nowadays
To keep all of it conventional
Though there are strategies
And plans
That
We must hope
Stay shelved
Recalling
Greater victory is peace
Living on
These same places
This
Same planet
After
x
C L Couch
x
x
6 June 1944
x
as soon as I realized the date there was a Western (admittedly) instinctive resonance—that something enormous, consequential happened on this date when it was a day a long time ago
x
Photo by Eric HOARAU on Unsplash
x
clcouch123 
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