What Can One Do?

by Brett Rutherford

What can one do against the tide of war?
For starters, one can write a thousand poems.
If soldiers stopped to write, each his epic,
there would be no need for bloody battles
as all the small deaths of The Iliad
are told again and anew in poems;
if sailors lay back in hammocks languidly
and counted out sonnet beats on fingers,
sleek submarines would stall, submerging not
nor even leaving their darkened harbors;
if the Seals and Marines were tasked with Greek,
to translate Anakreon’s erotics,
the boy-crazed sighing of Petronius,
or the athletic odes of high Pindar,
then verses they wrote would work themselves out
in indolent acts of one-another-
worship, the weapons all quite forgotten.

If everyone wrote each a thousand poems
there would be no time for conspiracies,
and the deer would go unkilled, the students
unmurdered in their high-school classrooms, all
manner of crimes would be but sublimate
inside poetic narratives of strife.
Each to her own Utopia, the dreamers
take to pen and keyboard — no one is slain
to prove a finer point of cold theory.

Blank verse? Free-verse? Epic? It matters not.
Saga or ballad or lordly sonnet?
Any will do. Get on with it. Send all
to your dull senators and congressmen;
dare them to answer you only in verse.

My manifesto made, my duty done.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine more to go!