Sacrifice

 

     There is a theory going around that,

I am wimp!

It emanates from a certain quarter

Who engage thoughts of battle’dom

And trouble causing,

To them I say;

Are you here for forgiveness,

Or to fight??

 

To step within ‘my’ shoes

Takes more than courage as a Man;

External voices and pain weakening

A daily stance and

Stand I did against the gun

Upon a Balkan War,

     No more the victor though for,

Why should this be at all?

 

     There is a theory that ‘I’m’ weak?

Yet I knew once a man ‘they’d’ said the same of,

So he kicked upon their ego –

Now he rests within a cemetery; –

The subject of revengeful killing

By those who couldn’t see him win;

Stabbed until his life-force bled away,

Now his children are fatherless.

 

     There is a theory as they boast

The conquest of a soldier,

But if they could feel inside

The heart of a veteran;

The witness of children losing fathers,

And grown men crying sat row upon row

In fear of taking bullet,

‘They’ just wouldn’t want the fight at all.

 

     Battle’dom,

Seeks not the madness of those

Keen to prove a point,

It is in its entirety a primitive

Way of being and

‘We’ all as soldiers

Wonder how we’d act

In theatres of war,

But ask your children do they

Want to lose their daddy,

And my tears would fall upon the floor.

 

     The courage in a Man

Be the teaching of his children,

It is not the killing of a brother

Or the taking of a bullet –

And it’s sad because,

Those most keen for battle

Are not the soldiers of the World

Who recognise the worth within a Life;

It is the armchair generals who’ll

Scream for blood and stoke

Their own inadequacies,

While envying the soldier

Who does tour upon tour

Of battlefields and quartered lands,

For in essence,

The ‘soldier’ knows,

The ‘true,’

Worth of peace.

 

Michael J Waite 22^nd July 2012.