Born into a battlement of blight, tiny hands reach up into the night. Gurgling from lips now turning white, ‘tis but a boy under the moonlight. The cosmos booms and crackles above with shooting stars of shelling (with love). Morning breaks; it wears a leather glove with spanking hand and a gentle shove. The rattle drops. His bones are all wrong from sucking the wartime teat too long. Contorted limbs from perishing song. His ribs are wire, he drags them along. The crib is a sordid training ground. The lily-livered stick he had found, he whittled right through its dying sound. He’s told he must be ready year-round. He lines up teddy bears, one by one, even from Mummy and Uncle John. He makes sure all of their heads are gone before passing the smoking baton. The rattle drops. He’s turned on his back. What is your major malfunction? *SMACK*— Don’t you be giving me any flack! With that, he returns to the play track. The crib’s a trench. Mud replaces milk along with any tatters of silk. There’s monst’rous night-noises from his ilk, only here, his mother’s soothings bilk. Hop, skip and jump over the classmates dead in the dirt from their iron weights. Wasting away as twilight abates, delinquents haunt the family estates. The rattle drops. The bayonet’s prime. He heaves out vapours sticky with grime. Above, the sky’s industrious chime; His clockwork god tells him it is time. Crib no more, this is no baby’s land, where corpses bloom like a swollen gland, to wither feverishly to sand following a bullet’s reprimand. His diminished clay-fired fingers creep, along the earth wherein blood does seep. No lullaby can lure him to sleep, for if he had to, he might just weep. The rattle drops. Through igneous dust, some stuffed animal shadows combust. Stirring under the night-light of rust, he gives a hug and then a knife thrust. The crib’s but a memory of where he’d panic he’d never see warfare. It was cold compared to this despair that wraps him up warn for the affair. Outgrowing his shrunken camouflage, his smelted skin a crusted litharge, it’s time to stop the child still at large, one in need of a bloody discharge. The rattle drops. Witness the once-brave, condemned to game this war as a a slave, marching right through a landmine’s enclave from the cradle to the unmarked grave. The crib contains the odd body part like a toddler practising fine art. Unaware if his manhood did start, the drumbeat slows in his bleeding heart. This is old age, left by his platoon, with the toothless gums of a buffoon. His bittersweet breath splutters a croon of the old rock-a-bye baby tune. Born into a battlement of blight, tiny hands reach up into the night. Gurgling from lips now turning white, ‘tis but a boy under the moonlight.
Warborn ~ A Poem by Tom Shaw
This might be one of the more important poems I have ever shared. With the desire of political leaders and black nobility families to have us wage endless wars in the ongoing extraction of nations wealth, this piece comes as a reminder that the young who are convinced in “fighting for their nation” are rarely doing anything of the sorts.
As I quote at the beginning of the video version:
There may not be many of us who have personally experienced the horrors of war - but it is perhaps telling how bleak the poems written by many of those who have been on the front lines of conflict are. Think Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Keith Douglas and so forth. I’m glad that we’re seeing a revived interest in their works given the current geopolitical theatre unfolding, and praise those like
who are highlighting their messages given our current context.
The words of the war poets serve as powerful reminders of why it is that these wars mean the destruction of humanity, as well as the ability that poetry has to in illuminating the consequences of a de-souled existence. Should you be encouraged by your political leaders to “fight for your country” and appeal to your patriotic sentiments, I implore you to ask: “Am I fighting for my country, or for somebody else’s vision of my country?”
For me, there is no better answer to that question than in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Conscript”, an excellent poem in its own right which inspired me to cover this topic myself. I encourage you to watch the video reading of his poem included below:
Thank you for taking the time to be with this piece. Let me know in the comments if it sparked something within you.
With gratitude,
Tom
