No Wars Are Won
Because someone always dies who’s
innocent, and someone else accidentally kills
his brother, and another soldier surrenders to
a darkness so profound it blinds his regiment.
Wars leave so much wreckage that even
vultures feel overwhelmed, scavenger dogs
get glutted with remorse, and silent battle scars
reappear in succeeding generations when
our grandchildren’s nightmares revisit
their elders’ war trauma.
No wars are won when scorched battlefields
lie fallow for decades, poisoned by toxins,
or when enemies pretend they’re reconciled,
when they’re simply muted by grief.
My father’s war made him feel lucky
to be alive, though he never left the “islands,”
Staten and Manhattan, and despised the Army.
Your father’s battles won him a bronze star,
a purple heart, shrapnel in his back, and worse,
PTSD that he’s passed on to you, his son—
Since your dad’s kin were murdered by Nazis,
his was a “good war,” he said. I disagree, for
how can any war be won when both sides
lose their moral compasses—when slain bodies
blanket earth, blindly sowing despair’s seeds?
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Where is the God of Mercy
in Gaza, the one who’d unwrap thousands of
tiny bodies from their bloody winding sheets, breathe
life back into their lungs, repair their wounds, then
recharge their infant hearts?
Where’s the God of Justice who’d have mediated
that October, before the massacres of innocents,
before mass graves filled with stacked bodies,
blinding a country with grief?
What I’m afraid of, what plagues my nights,
is that we get used to hell, accepting a callous world
overwhelmed by sickness, famine, cruelty, endless pain,
lifelong mourning—war’s traumatic legacies.
Death rides on and on, an unthwarted force of nature
driven by fear. Oh, where are the Gods of Forgiveness
Where’s compassion’s mastermind, the perpetrator
of compromise and sacrifice?
If we’ve fashioned God in our own image,
we have failed ourselves and all goodly creatures.
Piles of bones, faces of stone—our birthrights.
Our enemy lies (hides) within us.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Oh, America
Each week another deadly mass shooting is broadcast
into our lives. Murdered bodies are sprawled out
everywhere—in classrooms, nightclubs, supermarkets,
and massage parlors. Today six were killed in a bank.
Oh, America, in this Year of our Gore, gunmen
in Louisiana, Texas, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and
Tennessee are mowing down innocent human beings;
madmen are slaughtering our citizens in New York
and Colorado; they’re butchering our brethren in North
and South Carolina, in Maryland, Ohio, and Washington;
they’re using automatic rifles for carnage in Georgia,
Minnesota, Indiana, Arkansas, Illinois—America, listen!
You can hear semi-automatic bullets ricocheting off
our schoolroom walls in Florida, Wisconsin, and Oregon,
in California, Mississippi, Virginia, and New Jersey: they
echo with the wails of mourners. Oh, woe is us, America—
more than 300 souls have been ripped from their bodies
this year, their families forever bereft, and it’s only April.
Oh America, beat your breasts and voice your terrifying dirges,
your enraged lamentations, tear out your just-washed hair:
it’s clear that guns, murder, and mayhem comprise our
real religion, our unholy triumvirate. In just four months,
71 kids have had their small, beautiful bodies shattered,
their quiet or boisterous lives massacred, their blood vessels
ruptured, their bright selves slain, ravaged, destroyed
by assault weapons, and this genocide will never end,
America, until each one of us feels daily ten thousand
unnatural shocks that our flesh is now heir to.
Maurya Simon's tenth volume, The Wilderness: New & Selected Poems, received the 2019 Gold Medal in Poetry from the Independent Booksellers Association. Simon's twelfth volume of poems, The Blue Bridge, is forthcoming from Etruscan Press in early 2026. She’s been awarded an NEA Fellowship and residencies at the American Academy in Rome and the MacDowell Colony. Her poetry’s been translated into Hebrew, French, Spanish, Greek, and Farsi. Simon’s a Professor of the Graduate Division and a Professor Emerita at the University of California, Riverside. She divides her time between the Angeles National Forest and San Clemente, California.