Regime Change
A poem that focuses on the human cost of war. Plus, a poem for NaPoWriMo, day 4.
They talk— behind closed doors, conjuring reasons no one believes, sending men and women to distant places where dust hangs over barren fields. They leave their homes. Duty. Honor. Country. In service to a cause, their faces forgotten by a heartless regime, their names lost in lists. Families sit in quiet rooms, counting what won't come back, children asking questions that drift like leaves in the wind … … unanswered. War breaks bodies and spirits, but pain endures deeper, in flagged-draped coffins, in three-volley gun salutes, in blighted, rotting flowers, in silence inhabiting a house.
NAPOWRIMO #4
Today, we’d like to challenge you to craft your own short poem that involves a weather phenomenon and some aspect of the season. Try using rhyme and keeping your lines of roughly even length.
RETURNS
Wait. The sky turns bone. Far down the tarmac’s edge— Watch: they don’t come alone, The men who kept the pledge. Stand out in the cold rain. April has not warmed yet. Mark how the thunder’s vein Runs blue above the wet. Hold still beside the road. The flag snaps once, then sags. Yes—did the thunder load This whole spring up with flags?
Prompt Backstory
Via NaPoWriMo
In his poem, “Spring Thunder,” Mark van Doren brings us a short, haunting evocation of weather and the change in seasons.
Author's Note
I held “Regime Change” back for a month or more, waiting to see if this regime meant what it said about a short campaign. It didn’t. It isn’t.
The United States and Iran are at war. Americans have died. The poem grew from sitting with how power bends a story until the story serves the powerful, and someone else pays the price. A pretense becomes a deployment. A deployment becomes a coffin.
I wrote “Returns” this morning for day 4 of the NaPoWriMo challenge. It is a poem that lands on the tarmac, on the flag, on the single moment when the talking becomes a body coming home. The rhyme was a choice I took from the challenge. Military ritual has its own formal cadence—the folded flag, the three-volley salute—and a poem with shape and repetition carries that weight differently than one that sprawls.
Together, these poems are a way of bearing witness. To the people sent. To the families left counting what won’t come back. To the truth that got twisted on the way to a war.
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