Battle or Build?

A Poem by Tom Shaw

Jan 15, 2024

Are you here to wage a battle
or are you here to help me build?
Did you bring your sharpest weapons
or tools to forge and gold to gild?
Did you come to compete with me,
or did you come to collaborate?
For I do not want to fight against you,
instead unite as we head to our fate.
See, there are bigger threats in life
than my character assassinating yours.
Food is poison, medicine is death,
neighbours are strangers and work is chores.
Nature is withered, living is robotic,
the news is lying and the lies are truth.
Right now, all’s the wrong way round.
So what use is giving me a missing tooth?
I’m not here to wage a battle,
I am here to help you build.
I choose to put my axe to wood
and hoe to earth so fields are tilled.
I plant my seeds with ample space
and feed them water, not the blood
of all the foes I wished to slay
who could have been my closest bud.
Then I watch the flowers bloom –
flourish in to being their own.
I make the space I want to inhabit
and somewhere you can say you’ve known.
So are you here to wage a battle,
or are you here to help me build?
Battle or Build? - A Poem by Tom Shaw

“Battle or Build?” is one of the poems featured in my poetry book, Born Anew and Other Poems. It was one of the earliest pieces I composed for the book (and one of the first I turned into a framed print), setting the tone for how I approach my poetry in a much grander way than I could have ever imagined.

It’s easy to want to simply go in and tear down old systems for the sake of “getting rid of the evil” - but what comes in it’s place? I believe the evil we find ourselves pointing and screaming at in the world is really just a manifestation of an “evil” within us that lives unresolved - the kind that stems from unresolved traumas and addictions to living in victimised states of being. Thus, in the vacuum of hierarchy and structure that follows the collapse of the old, it is only more evil that then fills the void, and the cycle repeats again.

That is why I’m so drawn to poetry. Poetry is expressly designed to create the effect of beauty with language - beauty that we experience as the elevation of the soul, or the raising of our frequency, or however you choose to interpret that sensation. It is the pursuit of mastering language that thus allows me to construct new narratives and reasonings that help us solve the existential and societal problems of our time, rather than resorting to fruitless argument and ad-hominem attacks. It is poetry that allows us to reconnect with each other’s souls, and allow us to come together to work in collaboration on something greater than ourselves. The poetic works I showcase - and explorations on wielding the language and narratives of our times in aid of our human up-levelling - are my way of achieving a vision of resonance and harmony that I know is possible.

Building-over-battling is always a topic that I keep coming back to in other works I take on, (not just in poetry, but also my other essays and the novel I’m currently working on). We cannot just “get rid” of control narratives that plague us personally and communally if we do not have a more beneficial narrative to replace it. The more we try and “fight” our way through the agendas at play, then we can only feed the darkness.

So are you here to wage a battle - or are you here to help me build, and make the old control systems in our lives obsolete? Leave a comment and let me know.