War Poems, Political Poems, Poems About the Age of Misinformation

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At the moment the news is a bleak place. Genocide, wars, famine, refugees drowning at sea, working people relying on food banks, disability payments being cut, people’s right to protest revoked and all the while there are more and more billionaires paying less and less taxes. It is a corrupt place. A depressing place. And all the while there is more spin spin spin telling us what to think and telling us we didn’t see what we saw, we didn’t hear what we heard and really we are all just a bit hysterical and delusional.

This thread is not for debate, it’s for poems about war, misinformation, politics, poverty -about the modern world. Share poems you have read that that have resonated with you about the current world climate, that help you feel like you are not the only mad person in the asylum.

CHILD OF OUR TIME by Eavan Boland
for Aengus

Yesterday I knew no lullaby
But you have taught me overnight to order
This song, which takes from your final cry
Its tune, from your unreasoned end its reason,
Its rhythm from the discord of your murder
Its motive from the fact you cannot listen.

We who should have known how to instruct
With rhymes for your waking, rhythms for your sleep,
Names for the animals you took to bed,
Tales to distract, legends to protect,
Later an idiom for you to keep
And living, learn, must learn from you, dead,

To make our broken images rebuild
Themselves around your limbs, your broken
Image, find for your sake whose life our idle
Talk has cost, a new language. Child
Of our time, our times have robbed your cradle.
Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken.

FIRST THEY CAME
By Martin Niemöller

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/files/2019-01/First%20They%20Came%20by%20Martin%20Niem%C3%B6ller_0.pdf?l6HOtWW1N8umC_ELxnQI6NpaAYbxRCJj=

Oh.

Ive not come across that before. Thank you.

It was based on an image of a fireman pulling a child out of the rubble in the Dublin bombings in 1974 but when I read about children dying in bombings I am always brought back to this poem.
I first read it as a teenager but now reading it again as a mother I find it is has a deeper gut punch. She has a few beautiful poems that look at war - The War Horse and Outside History being other favourites of mine.

I recently read a poem with similar sentiments by a Palestinian poet, published in 2014.

Oh Rascal Children Of Gaza
by Khaled Juma

Oh rascal children of Gaza,
You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window,
You who filled every morning with rush and chaos,
You who broke my vase and stole the lonely flower on my balcony,
Come back –
And scream as you want,
And break all the vases,
Steal all the flowers,
Come back,
Just come back…

https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/oh-rascal-children-of-gaza-a-poem/

For those that were struck about the anti protest legislation, or by media spin attacking protesters for protesting. For anyone who has been held up in traffic and cursed the protesters (slightly guilty of this myself). Kevin Higgins, an incredible poet and also human rights advocate, wrote a poem about people who just made their point politely and went home. Kevin sadly passed away 3 years ago but continued writing and protesting from his hospital bed.

A Brief History of Those Who Made Their Point Politely and Then Went Home – Kevin Higgins

On this day of tear-gas in Seoul
and windows broken at Dickins & Jones,
I can’t help wondering why a history
of those, who made their point politely
and then went home, has never been written.

Those who, in the heat of the moment,
never dislodged a policeman’s helmet,
never blocked the traffic or held the country to ransom.
Someone should ask them: “Was it all worth it?”

All those proud men and women, who never
had the National Guard sent in against them;
who left everything exactly as they found it,
without adding as much as a scratch to the paintwork;
who no-one bothered asking: “Are you or have you ever been?”
because we all knew damn well they never ever were.

A pretty famous one by a professor of world literature and creative writing, Refaat Alareer. It was shared a lot online after the poet was killed in an IDF airstrike in Gaza along with his brother, nephew, sister and three of her children.

If I Must Die
by Refaat Alareer

If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze —
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself —
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above,
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love.
If I must die
let it bring hope,
let it be a story.