War Books

These days, we fight a different kind of war –
no heroes (they’re all dead), no brave hurrahs
from doomed battalions, glimpsed through binoculars,
holding some pointless ridge, stupidly sure
of their own legend, which we now ignore
except to joke about in clubs and bars.
In any case, we carry our own scars,
not ones we’d want the future to explore –

we’ve carpet-bombed grey cities, we’ve misled
the other side, ourselves, with lies. We know
what matter’s simply staying alive, being fed,
that buying power wins battles, while the brief glow
of victory means nothing to the dead:
that these are rules; that it was always so.

II

We might have met when we could both believe
it meant more than a way of shutting out
hard-earned self-knowledge, wisdom, caution, doubt –
when it was so much easier to deceive
ourselves, each other; when we were both naïve
enough to think life could be lived without
the damage of the passing years, the drought
which has no respite. Now everything that we’ve

burnt through in this short week, this sense of being
suddenly opened, dizzy with vertigo,
radically free, of rediscovered feeling,
even ‘who we really are’, we’ve learnt will go,
that there’s no rainbow’s end, no new beginning:
since there are rules; and it was always so.


Tom Vaughan
 
If you have any thoughts on this poem, Tom Vaughan would be pleased to hear them.