Pro Pace Destruere
'To Destroy for the Sake of Peace': a poem inspired by Owen Wilfred's 'Dulce et Decorum Est'
Pro Pace Destruere
Keeling and wretched, like parched willows by a dead river bed,
They scurry to a safe zone—a whisking-away, an evacuation;
Lives reduced to clothes on backs and unfed
Stomachs that propel them toward hopes of salvation.
Walk, don’t fall asleep, there is fire above you.
Run to shelter, hope it will exist in five minutes time.
There are tanks and soldiers and grenades among you;
Ignore the shells dropping softly behind.
Bombs! BOMBS! Quick, boys!—the refugee camp begins to convulse;
Ballooning hills of concrete and flesh sprout out of the ground.
They instantaneously extinguish every pulse,
And girls fall into infinite sleep without a sound.
Grey through smoky columns and thin sniper trajectories,
As under a limelight, we see it all but can do nothing.
In too few people’s dreams and not one senator’s mind
Children plunge into erasure, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some mad nocturnal terror
You too could heave,
As penance for an unacquainted warfarer’s
Bloodlust, blankets and limbs still sleeved
From the detritus of your land
And the throes of your people;
And if you could touch a babe devoid
Of life, you’d know that war’s infernal,
And that revenge is a brackish, hollow opioid
That begets apocalypse eternal.
My senator, you’d know hatred repressed
Is a coal-mine canary;
You work for me—not at the behest
Of scythe and cemetery;
You’d heed my advice, not Bibi’s glower:
Get a grip you, grow a pair, you goddamn coward;
Spurn the vicious blood fest
And the neocon military
diktat: dulce et decorum est
Pro pace destruere.
Here’s Wilfred’s poem, which was publish posthumously in 1920:
Dulce et decorum est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.