War Thoughts Poem by D A Phinney

Where is it written that we will
That freedom of choice
Is license to kill

Who empowered kings
To find in war
The natural order of things

On India's blasted plains
After all these millenia
The evidence remains

Who were the evil ones
Who broke Atlantis' mighty rise
And left her merely lost and legendary
Just one more cautionary tale
To be incautiously ignored

So where do evil and war begin
If not in survivors of the slaughter
Where children keen amid
The rubble of their homes
And hollow nameless bodies
A wail that grows to battle cries
They pillage the hated pillagers
Leaving lost children orphaned
Crawling over their own destroyed worlds
Along the same path of hatred
What else is left to the shattered ones
But to remake the world in their own image
To make it mirror the cracked and broken lives
That are all they'll ever know
Yet... these at least we understand
We can make sense of tragedy

But are these the evil ones
Who so much evil do
Then explain why you make war
When no one has injured you
Would you think it a great deprivation
To dropp from three meals to one
Yet your children are CNN warriors
And you pay to have it done

'For order (and wealth) must be maintained,
For the world is a dangerous place,
Now would you like to order a tank or a plane
So your neighbor can't make you lose face?
You don't think you will need weapons?
He's your friend and has always been meek?
Well, just between us, keep it on the QT,
I sold him four hundred last week.
Yes, your people bemoan what you do for them,
What money remains won't go far,
But I insist that you see that the richer I am
The more safe and secure you are, capice? '