As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poets’ Corner  

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914 before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed, artists who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other, writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy, writers of not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and the maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets, musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man, that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist, world and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels.

And then the war drums intensified and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for….            

"WHEN THERE IS PEACE"


"_When there is Peace our land no more
Will be the land we knew of yore._"
  Thus do our facile seers foretell
  The truth that none can buy or sell
And e'en the wisest must ignore.

When we have bled at every pore,
Shall we still strive for gear and store?
  Will it be Heaven? Will it be Hell,
    When there is Peace?

This let us pray for, this implore:
That all base dreams thrust out at door,
  We may in loftier aims excel
  And, like men waking from a spell,
Grow stronger, nobler, than before,
    When there is Peace.

_Austin Dobson_