Warfare by Remote Control
Babies are screaming from the night time sky,
preventing sleep amidst the blasted homes;
twenty-four seven, there’s a buzz on high,
dipping and diving when a person roams.
Leaflets, like litter from an autumn tree,
fluttering groundward, strewing pockmarked roads,
tell dispossessed folk, “Again, you must flee,
abandoning once more your pulverised abodes.”
Drones firing missiles and disgorging bombs,
quadcopters gunning—who knows for whom?
For children? The elderly? Dads and moms?
This war-torn land’s an unquenchable tomb.
What manner of person can take such delight,
unleashing on others implacable spite?
Paul A. Freeman is the author of Rumours of Ophir, a crime novel which was taught in Zimbabwean high schools and has been translated into German. In addition to having two novels, a children’s book and an 18,000-word narrative poem (Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers!) commercially published, Paul is the author of hundreds of published short stories, poems and articles.
WHEN CYCLOPES TOOK OVER ITHACA
Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice ne la miseria.
Dante. Inferno.
With ripped-out roots you’ll weep pain, yearn for long,
now the Cyclopes have soiled Ithaca’s soil
and cast you and yours from coasts once all bliss ;
you’ll write homesick poems as an alien song,
your pen bleeding from the trauma and toil
of both Scylla’s and Charybdis’ hiss
you rafted adrift on the restless sea,
roaming desperate for a civilised life,
your childhood joy buried in dreamt-of times
when everyone prospered in homeland harmony;
friends, family, landscape lost to one-eyed strife.
Let woeful rhapsodes wail the lyre’s rhymes :
You’ll miss blest Ithaca forevermore
distant, acrid smoke from a vanished shore.
Great rendering of what abuse many are suffering today, Paul . Violent governments are the main cause of migration and exiles today, which reminded me of this poem I wrote above.
I lived in Zimbabwe under the Mugabe regime until being forced out. The diaspora are just as you imagine, nostalgic for a verdant land that still feels like home.
They remind me of the plague of “locusts” mentioned in “Revelation” in the “Bible.”
There’s a not very good film (though it’s one I’ll put on to veg out and be entertained) called Angel has Fallen, which is I believe may be the first film to envisage a mass drone attack. Meanwhile, an episode of Elementary with Johnnie Miller from years ago featured a micro-drone that sounded like a mosquito and injected a lethal dose of poison. This seems to be where we’re at.
With all the other problems around, like AI eliminating jobs and creativity, and (if you’re as convinced as I am) global warming (I worked July in England and it was a scorcher – again), it does indeed feel like we’re headed in the wrong direction.
Also from revelation when the seventh angel pours out the bowl of wrath on the land…rumblings, peals of thunder, lightening and a great earthquake…from the sky huge hailstones fell on people…
By “remote control” makes it all the more chilling; the safety of the drone operator many miles away with no risk of his own danger. Very timely Paul. What are we to do?
We need to grow a conscience, Gerard. Poets, especially, I find, are only complete if they have a streak of compassion for their fellow man in them.
The science of warfare is a perpetually ongoing study, since the ability to wage effective war is a crucial necessity for any nation or people that wants to survive. For this reason, no one can be “behind the curve” when it comes to the latest developments in weaponry or equipment.
And yet moralists have always managed to wail and moan about any new discovery or improvement in offensive force that gives an edge to those who have it. Clerics in the middle ages raised objections to the crossbow as “unfair” and “immoral,” gunpowder was deemed “a tool of the devil,” the matchlock gun was thought an infernal invention, the submarine was damned as a coward’s tool, the machine gun was seen as a horrendous violation of the gentlemanly art of war, and our left-liberals went into a holy shit-fit about “evil” nuclear weapons after 1945.
Now unmanned drones, being both effective and cheap, have changed the rules of conventional warfare. But the moral whining still goes on.
Poison gas, military aircraft used as missiles, civilian aircraft used as missiles, vehicles used to mow people down, now drones. I wouldn’t characterise those who find such unconventional weapons and weaponisation as morally reprehensible as wailers, moaners and whiners.
It’s a matter of practicality, Paul. If your enemy has a new and effective weapon, you have to have it too. Otherwise you will be defeated. The American Indians found out real fast that they had better drop the bows and arrows and get flintlock muskets when the Europeans showed up with them.
In World War I, the Germans introduced poison gas to the battlefield, with tremendous effect. It broke open a huge gap in the British line. Of course the politicians and the newspapers and the pulpits condemned it as morally outrageous, uncivilized, barbaric, and against the laws of honorable warfare. Wailing, moaning , and whining ad nauseam! And yet the British and the other allies immediately began their own poison gas programs, and very soon they too were using it in combat. A score of new gases and smokes were developed very quickly.
The somberness and measured pace of your language here, Paul, make your poem effective. War is horrible in all its forms. We need reminders.
So wrapped up as we are in our own everyday concerns, it’s sometimes difficult, if not impossible, to put ourselves in the place of those displaced by war, who struggle even for the means to survive, whose people have no access to, or are denied, medical aid, and have no means to educate a generation.
We do indeed need reminders.
Piling up threatening perspectives in the octave, and questions in the sestet, makes an effective and memorable war sonnet, Paul. The title supplies distance for contemplation.
It somehow makes it easier to torment, maim or kill our enemies if we’re not doing it face to face and are as distanced as possible. I suppose it also makes it easier for the public if they never get to see the consequences of such warfare.
This poem was spurred by a documentary I saw at about 2am one morning, the documentary starting with the psychological warfare of the screaming (baby screams) drone, the screams lasting all night long, in an effort to force people away from their bombed out homes. I just couldn’t fathom what kind of human would come up with such an idea.
After-dinner reading in philosophy applies, Paul. A commentor on Aristotle’s Poetics says, “Wonder is the aim of the poetic art, into which the aim of tragedy in particular merges.” Your questions in the sestet here show wonder, while the threats narrated in the octave consider tragedy. Tragedy merges into wonder. A good reading of “Warfare by Remote Control.”
I get the feeling that the mind can only process so much tragedy. The number of people I know who don’t watch the news anymore, from my daughter here in England, to my Mauritanian landlord. They’re still very aware, however, of what’s going on around them, but seem immobilised by frustration.
This poem was originally for another site (the prompt was the word ‘flutter’), but I eventually wrote one about butterflies, for all our sanity!
My impression is that you over-dramatize and under-think the subject matter you attempt to delineate, and, because that was our expectation all along, no one has been disappointed.
There’s none as blind as those that refuse to see.
And there are none as insightful as those who look past their nose. Try it!