The First Victim of War

Posted on by Opher

War poetry

The First Victim of War

We’re listening to the news

To find what we have in store.

Just a sanitised version –

Truth is always the first victim of war.

We’re told casualty numbers

So that we can keep the score.

We don’t know if we can trust them.

Truth is always the first victim of war.

The rich are still making money

As sanctions hit the poor.

All carefully hidden up;

Truth is always the first victim of war.

The sight of the broken victims

Touch us to the core,

But how much is propaganda?

Truth is always the first victim of war.

The horror of the war crimes

All civilised people deplore.

Are paraded before us

Truth is always the first victim of war.

It crystallises clearly

What it is that we stand for.

The truth we hold before us:

Truth is always the first victim of war.

Opher – 1.3.2022

I’m watching all the news with a critical eye. I am aware of the propaganda being poured forth on both sides.

The Russians are putting forward a view that their glorious soldiers are liberating enslaved Ukrainians who are living under a neo-Nazi regime.

We are seeing reports of Russian soldiers surrendering, refusing to fight and abandoning equipment.

We see the gallant citizens making Molotov cocktails and people flooding back into the country to fight the invader.

Russia tightens its grip and pounds civilian areas with cluster bombs and missiles.

War is nothing more than organised murder.

The truth??  Hard to see clearly in the fog of war.

Big Green Ball

Posted on by Opher

The Environment

While I was driving around the country I had plenty of time to think. What we are doing to the planet, the loss of so many species, the ravaging of our rainforests, the overpopulation – it all drives me mad.

The Big Green Ball

Big green ball

To kick around

It’s just a game

Too soon and gone

The wear and tear

Such a shame

Opher 25.6.2018

Refugees and Ruins

Posted on by Opher

Refugees and Ruins

Millions of refugees

                Desperately flee

                                On foot,

                                                By train, bus and car.

Escaping

                Vengeance

                                Of Russia’s

                                                Despotic Cazar.

The leave mass graves

                In their wake.

While maimed and broken

                In basements quake.

The Russian cannons roar

                And tenements crumble.

The voice of reason

                Lost in war’s evil rumble.

Putin and his Generals

                Should be in the front line.

If they were all wiped out

                Things might work out fine.

Millions of refugees

                Desperately flee

                                On foot,

                                                By train, bus and car.

Escaping

                Vengeance

                                Of Russia’s

                                                Despotic Cazar.

Opher -22.4.2022

It is almost inconceivable to me that in this modern age an army could invade another country and systematically reduce its cities to rubble, terrify millions and execute hundreds of thousands.

It is shocking to see the schools and hospitals deliberately targeted, the people hunted down, raped and coldly executed.

It is wicked to see the civilian houses intentionally destroyed.

What is worse is to hear the propaganda pouring out to justify this invasion with its wanton destruction and genocide.

The lies are the worst, poisoning minds, generating hatred and resulting in atrocities.

War reveals the worst of human nature. We are the most depraved and vicious animals

Poetry – Stalked

Posted on by Opher

Stalked

Stalked by our own virility

The cthonic monster of fertility

Will drown us in our own flesh.

The Malthusian oceans of humanity

Riding swells of pleasure and vanity

Have snared us in its mesh.

Like a flood

Inundating

The Earth

Sweeping all before it.

Like a fire

Consuming

The land

Turning it to ash

Like a plague

Infecting

The body

Dissolving the breath

Swamping everything

Reducing everything

Killing everything

In the pangs of pleasure.

Opher 13.4.2018

The flood of humanity is consuming the earth, destroying the forests, slaughtering all creatures and leaving smog, pollution and devastation in their wake.

We are busy turning this beautiful green planet into a sterile ball of concrete, plastic and bacterial slime.

It’ll take us some time but the project is well under way.

Unless we put an end to this capitalist religious impetus for more, for growth and expansion we will destroy the very thing that gives us life and nourishes our souls.

Poetry – A Holocaust

Posted on by Opher

A Holocaust

A holocaust

Six million burnt.

A holocaust

Pol Pot and Uganda.

A holocaust

Rwanda and Sarijevo.

Genocide on scales unimaginable.

Repeated with regularity.

Out of the psyche

Of humanity.

A holocaust. A holocaust. A holocaust.

Nagasaki.

Hiroshima.

Dachau.

Auschwitz.

A holocaust. A holocaust. A holocaust.

Every decade

Another atrocity

Is designed.

Yet

A holocaust

For nature

Every single day.

A holocaust. A holocaust. A holocaust.

Opher 9.5.2016

A Holocaust

I wrote this after reading a poem that talked of Holocaust. I am sorry I cannot track it down and so cannot tell you the poet’s name. He was castigated for applying the term holocaust to things such as poverty. He was told it was disrespectful.

I do not agree.

The holocaust perpetrated by the fascists in Germany against the Jews, Gypsies, Trade Unionists, Communists and others was a horrendous crime of unimaginable cruelty and scale. Yet it is one of many such crimes. They occur with monotonous regularity. Cruelty and barbarity has been an ingredient of human nature throughout time.

We run the world to create inequality from which millions die. Poverty is as much a holocaust as the Nazis orchestrated. It is there by design.

Genocides are not always concentrated in one vicinity.

ISIS is demonstrating the barbarity of humanity as they think up the most sadistic methods of killing people.

The terrorist bombers loading shrapnel and nails into their bombs must imagine the flesh and organs being ripped. The thought of these horrific injuries probably causes them satisfaction.

But for me the greatest crime of all is not that inflicted by people on other people; it is the mindless destruction of nature, the slaughter of our wild-life, the cruelty inflicted on animals.

As the relentless intrusion into habitat, the poaching, hunting and building, the deliberate inflicting of pain, continues on a daily basis; each and every day is a holocaust for nature.