Poetry, Part Fifty-six

The Carter Administration went out, and the Reagan Administration came in. And the military was beefed up, more money spent, more weapons systems given the go-ahead. The Soviet military machine was again defined as a huge and growing menace for the U.S. even while they were still bogged down in Afghanistan. New bombers and new missiles and new weapons for the army were coming off the assembly lines or the design boards. While AIDS was about to devastate the world in its own horrific way, the U.S. was acting as if the Cold War was never going to end, and that it was going to keep raising the stakes, no matter the cost.

World Civilization 101

They want us to fear again for our defense.

In their lessons
we are taught to remember
past defeats of peoples without sufficient protection.

When the examples don't apply,
we whittle our memories to fit.
We are afraid.

But I read,
and remember when I teach,
that wars chop off the lengths of civilization.

The Assyrians, for example,
for whom war was god and weapons divine,
conquered for a time and were crushed.
It follows.

Yes, weapons have a way of cutting both ways
when in use. And
a weapon launched is a weapon lost for defense.
(More platitudes, I know,
and I have more.)

In our defense,
once when I was a part,
I watched missiles among the wheat fields of North Dakota.
And I asked myself then,
"How will the millions of survivors
survive without wheat?"
A few loaves won't feed the multitude it once did.

We are too many;
our weapons are too much;
and we war too often to thrive.

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