Geneva Convention

She dreams, like us all, of many things each night,
Of how we fail to fix the leaks around the house,
The high-speed career through empty life,
And how she was once a fighting man; dead soldier,

Who before his end by air bombs, lived a fetid life,
Of boredom, hunger, dull ailments in mud and dust,
Which make a war long-ended still regarded “modern”,
When compared with those that went before,

Red-coated glories, the rush through fields agreed,
Beforehand with the enemy who nod to cousins,
And order patriotic hordes, ablaze with fevers,
Born of loyalty to men who know to lift a finger,

When they take tea with mother in the nursery,
And down to this we’ve come, deprived of honour,
All that filters through the years to us, to sign,
To agree that one way of killing is one way too far,

And leave all the others legal, approved and stamped,
With marks of blocs, alliances and nations,
And every one considered civilized and stable,
Compassionate, concerned. It is OK to kill this way.

Then comes the banal list of prohibited atrocities,
The fire, the bugs, the bullets which explode on entry,
As if damage after that is not quite cricket.
The mines, which as a side-effect take children,

More than any soldier, the yellow bombs like toys,
Prizes found on bomb-sites to take as souvenirs,
In the fire-stormed, sun-blinded, shattered towns,
In the paddy fields, concealed and lasting years.

And here men argue, dark-suited diplomats at trade,
To swap cluster bombs for chemicals and bugs,
Tossing military-corporate management trash around,
Tick “strategic”, tick “advantage” in your buzzword bingo.

By the sea in the dappling of seventy-two degrees,
Fine set for a week of work and after-hours tennis,
She dreams of family men, designers making weapons,
And cannot see how that neural pathway works,

How coming home to that cliché survives the rounds
Of news reports that are the distant testing grounds,
The market research launched from sunny Glendale,
Is a clipboard shining light on paradox.