Young Man's Conscience

Note:
Here is a piece I read at the Beat Museum, when the Women's Poetry Collective called Tara's Tongue, which inspired me to call this blog by that same name, was performing that night, in the section of the Beat Museum dedicated to female Beat poets. This poem is dedicated to soldiers in all times and places, with sympathy and a prayer for their liberation from the horrors of combat and war overall.

why did you give me war?
I am not your soldier
I am not your warrior
Mother, Father, why have you
aligned me with forces
bent on endless destruction
and desecration?
I call out to you
distressed
I cry out in my sleep
and nobody hears
my dreams are plagued by battles
why have you given me war
when all I wanted was peace?
Now it eludes me
remains frozen in a distant future
a vague possibility

I am not content to fight, to kill
to bring suffering
to women and children
to pretend that men are separate
that I am superior
that the assigned enemy deserves
endless punishment

No.
I resist your maps of untimely death
I will not follow

My soul is sick and weary from these wars
I know there is another way
I believe I will find it.