ON THE SECOND IRAQ WAR

(by Frederick Turner April 2003)

Few wars are ever quite as pure as this.

Around the world's round haunch you feel the shriek

Of thousands as their burning souls seek bliss,
The weight of guilt that bends us week by week;

But there's another sense, the cooling ebb

Of fever as the great boil, lanced, begins to shrink,

The lightening that dawns across the web

Of human comradeship, the cold sweet drink

Of liberty that's lifted to their lips,

The first small flowers of truth among the lies,

The lancet of a bright apocalypse,

The gasp of joy as death sheds its disguise.

Out of the sacred dust of Babylon,

The groves of Ur where Jacob once sought wives,

Has come the half-bred monster, half our own,

And half the oppression of a billion lives.

And so it's time the youngest breed of men,

Mixing themselves, as Tocqueville foresaw,

Back to the race of Adam, tried again

To build the Babel-tower on a just law.

And our young soldiers are so quiet and fine!

How did we merit their strange chivalry,

Their truthfulness, their loyalty, their spine,

After our decades of dishonesty?

And will again they save us from our flaws,

Those gentle warriors purged of irony,

As they once did, upon as great a cause,

Amidst the blood-drenched surf of Normandy?