I have followed in this new century four wars and this writer has felt overwhelmed by the tragedies of schools being blown up along with teachers, staff and their young charges. It seems when a nation decides on war be it in Iran, Gaza, Israel, Ukraine, Sudan, we sooner than later read another school has received the missiles and machetes. This Project rejects war and violence and struggles to bring peace simply because it just might be better to live and die in the struggle for peace than for any other end. I tried to put myself in place of a person whose child was in one of those schools such as the bombed school last week in Southern Iran. This narrative poem is for all the victims whose lives are summed up by the war machines as “Collateral Damage”.

The Three Lives of Collateral Damage

First Life

If I were to learn of a rocket pounding down from the sky insinuating its deadly l0ad into my child’s school, savaging my child’s body, my present life would end for me. Yet, I would not die.

Second Life

No merciful death would be offered me in this unwanted second life. I would continue with the necessity of breathing. I would walk despite all. I would boil at any altitude. I would spend my second life of collateral grief raging. Most of all I would despise that rocket and nation that stole my daughter from her books, from her beauty, from her grace, from me.

Third Life

But finally, at life’s end I might draw the curtain on the dulling cycle of anger. I might claim this last remnant of a grieving life span so I could search for the space where those innocents lost to wars reside. I would heat up my love-seeking heart forgiving the broken people of and under war, but never would I forgive those warring nations who made our simple, precious lives just so much collateral damage.

Brief Proposal for Good

War is an amoral machine that is fired up when unskillful people fail to find a solution that doesn’t require war. Could you live and be consoled with the verdict of “collateral damage”? I doubt it. Avoid war like the curse it is. That would be so good.