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.

Freedom is infectious

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Freedom is infectious

Putin and his oligarchs are in control

They claim the right to direct us.

Same with Johnson, Trump and the elite

They claim to protect us.

But freedom is infectious.

Stand against the establishment machine

They claim that we are reckless.

They bleed us dry, laugh and sigh

Then kick us in the solar plexus.

But freedom is infectious.

Ukraine, Russia or the USA

The people’s spirit connect us

That elite is just the same

They never respect us

But freedom is infectious.

But freedom is infectious.

Freedom is infectious.

Opher – 7.3.2022

The real war is the one that has raged down the centuries – between the ones who are in control and the rest of us.

In primitive times it was the chief and shaman who held the power, had their pick of everything, lived in plenty and presided.

As ‘civilisation’ grew, kings, princes and robber barons, Bishops, Popes and Sheikh, lived in their palaces while the majority lived in hovels.

The powerful took from the poor until they had more than they could ever use. Ostentation lived beside poverty and death.

It still does.

The superyachts crowd the marinas while beggars starve in the streets.

That is the real war.

Whether it is the billionaire Trump, the greedy Tories or Putin and the oligarchs; they are all part of the same problem – gross inequality.

It’s time we ‘civilised’ people created a freer, more equal society – a global society without tribes and war.

Wilfred Owen – The Next War

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For me this poem, one of Wilfred’s lesser known ones, is all in the last three words.

It’s a game played by the wealthy elite for power and gain. There is nothing noble about it. It is base, corrupt and built on greed and power.

It is about flags, patriotism and possession. What wars have been just wars?

How could they all have been avoided?

For this men, women and children die horrible deaths. They crouch in trenches expecting death – and death comes all around them.

It is a joke.

War’s a joke for me and you,
While we know such dreams are true.
– Siegfried Sassoon

The Next War 

Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death,-
Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,-
Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.
We’ve sniffed the green thick odour of his breath,-
Our eyes wept, but our courage didn’t writhe.
He’s spat at us with bullets and he’s coughed
Shrapnel. We chorussed when he sang aloft,
We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier’s paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed, -knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.

Wilfred Owen

A Green Land – Opher Goodwin Poetry

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A Green Land

All I can do is stand at the side of a green field somewhere, that exhibits no hints of red, and stare.

To allow my imagination stark over the undulating hill and pock mark.

To note the fully fledged trees in the wood swaying slightly in the warm breeze.

Their leaves shimmering and releasing a distant twitter of unseen birds with voices unceasing.

To gaze, listen and wonder.

To allow my mind to settle back to the absurd when there was no silence, in which a bird could sing and be heard,

No perch for tiny feet,

No breeze untainted with smoke or heat,

No green to be seen across those soft hillsides or in amongst the splintered wood of has been.

Just the brown of churned mud speckled with the red of poppy and blood

And the constant crump, whistles and sighs and occasional cries.

Opher 4.11.2017

I wrote this one in memory of standing on the fields of Flanders with my friend Tony, my youngest son and wife. He was showing us the battle fields which lay before us now verdant in the sunshine. We visited Oppy Wood which was latticed with trenches and whose trees had been reduced to splintered skeletons by the shelling but which was now back to its former glory.

Apart from the trenches there were the faint pock marks of shell holes. But the land had recovered. The sucking mud of Flanders on which the poppies grew so virulently among the body parts, had settled into gentler contours and lay peacefully at rest. The trees were back and the air was full of birdsong. The peace betrayed the cacophony of shrieking metal and larynxes that had been so long ago.

One was left with the question why.

SUICIDE IN THE TRENCHES – Siegfried Sassoon

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I always found this one of Sassoon’s most powerful poems. So simple in structure with its rhyming couplets yet encapsulating the horror that drove a happy young man to take his own life.

SUICIDE IN THE TRENCHES

By Siegfried Sassoon

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.