Holy Wars for Us
        No Holy Wars far them; the most the small
        Can ever give us is a nuisance brawl.
                — Robert Frost, "No Holy Wars for Them"

Frost's world is gone, if it was ever here.
States strong enough to do good bring, instead,
more wrong than he imagined. Every year,
they offer threats designed to silence dread
(nothing restores the confidence they've lost),
and brute force — self-perpetuating, vast.
Frost, are you listening? Those states too small
break into tribes that rise up in a rage
of bloodshed that won't stop. The nuisance brawl
is sneak attack and murder, ancient page
and verse updated to record the crimes
that add up, death by death, to countless lifetimes.
The great lose ground. What should they guard it with?
Real bombs explode all rhetoric and myth.

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Copyright © 2017 Ned Balbo All rights reserved
from Upcycling Paumanok
Measure Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission