Unremarkable Issues Of War Poem by Roger Gerald Hicks

Pre-dawn light. Bleak, black, rocky shore, aqua-marine
lapped bordering the Corniche on the left.Roaring banshee
screams on high preclude falling canisters with their
ball-bearings and efficient killing explosives five
kilometers on the right.

Beirut celebrates Sabbath,Friday, Saturday, and Sunday
just as, London, L.A, Paris, or San Francisco
but streetcars no long ply bomb contorted Rue Bliss
with worshippers.

Today, the Christian Sabbath, Israeli piloted F-16s! !
Clamorous bellowing; booming booms staccato booms
violate the calm of sleeping children's nurseries.

AUB in Ras Beirut, my alma mater, flounders -
a torpedoed carrier unable to launch, unable to sink.
Professors rudely shoved into car trunks, terraced soccer
fields overrun with un-mowed brown weeds, knowledge
a trickle pinched off by war like other city services.

Nearby some boys huddle, toy guns cleverly silenced and
concealed.Still others shout in whispers, dash about on soft
frightened feet pretending childhood has meaning if not
color; eyes averted from aircraft, as if to blot them out.

Once, wistful-eyed Phoenician wives fed pyres pine, cedar,
and incense to light mariners home
from this shore;
today descendants numbly, in gasoline,
burn dead children.