The horror, the terror
The loss of humanity,
The effect on decency,
Of the blood spilled in those trenches of WWI
All who lay in those muddied fields,
The sheer magnitude of the loss,
A generation of young men,
Guided by general HQ staff on both sides
Likes pawns in a chess game.
Each soldier lost,
A life,
A son, father, brother, friend.
Husbands leaving children and wives behind
A generational loss of millions,
The next, orphaned without the father
La nom du pere…the absent fatherhood.
And as I watch, sobbing,
For what man does to man
In the name of…
Statehood, religion, politics, fatherland,
All the...isms.
The false twentieth century promises
The broken ideologies,
The religions of blood,
Red rivers flowing into a sea of death.
For honor and dignity and a sense of purpose
Dying in the name of...
Dying for a cause…
Dying for the flag…
That bloodied uniform
Bedecked with ribbons or medals
Each speaking of some heroism or battle survival.
And that uniform
And that rank
And that split between lower class enlisted
And educated Oxbridge officers.
And the sheer decency of the British soul
As portrayed
And experienced
And the pride of the Austro-Hungarian soldier
(I remember pictures of a proud uniformed Ziga Barzi)
And yet my olive 1970 skin
Was a barrier to my enlistment
in the Guards
When interviewed,
As a young medical student.
“Not the right stuff”
For their regiment.
The outsider..
The Jew…
Not privileged to serve
Maybe of dubious moral character
Did they think?
As expressed by melatonin pigmentation.
We are sent into war
We are meant to die
“Pro patria morie”
We glory in death
For country, culture and freedom.
But at the end of the day
Lies this insanity
This bloodthirst
What Jung called Wotan.
A mythical drive to end and destroy
To dominate and bleed.
With the so-called Enlightenment
Comes the modern day state
And its darker side
The state of terror.
My Israeli nephew grieves for his lost comrade-in-arms.
He visits his family
And honors his memory
But that hole in his heart remains
Like a lesion
God shaped
He nurtures the pain
Drowned, once, in chemicals to soothe the anguish.
And my patients and comrades with PTSD
who suffer daily the reoccurring loss
Ever present…
The moments of death
And the mystery of their survival
The guilt and self-recrimination
The living in-the-absence of friends and comrades-in-arms
The nightmare that never ceases.
We only have the survivors
And the memories,
And the historical record.
But what have we learned from this mass blood-letting?
About man, god and history?
The visual images haunt me
In a ghost-like apparition
A dream that keeps coming back
As if in a past life.
I too am drowning in the terror of the trenches
Facing my fear of the end
Of death creeping up on me
For that moment,
The ending of all that is near and dear
Precious and fraught.
The end of loving another
The end of helping an-other
The end of caring for an-other.
