INTRODUCTION

We are now on Day #5 of this 7-day series of war poems which will culminate on November 11th. On Day #1, I already gave a pithy intro to the series. You can still consult that intro if you would like to understand more about it. I also presented a double-sonnet entitled “Another Side of War” which examined the bellicose nature of the belligerent, divisive Left-Right paradigm in politics. On Day #2, I presented another double-sonnet, entitled “Make Yourself a No-One”. It opened up how to respond when your government wages war against its own population by introducing a digital “Bitte Ihre Unterlagen!” (“Papers, please!”) society. On Day #3, I presented a poem entitled “When Wars Become a Warcrime”, which deals with the terrible toll that warring takes on its combatants who so easily become dehumanized merely by being in a “theatre” in which anything goes, regardless of any conventions. Yesterday, on Day #4, I presented a poem entitled “The Cosmic Struggle”, which took Matthew 24:6 as its starting point to show the place of war in the cosmos and the struggle which underlies it . Today, on Day #5, I present a sonnet entitled “Another Way of Killing”, which explores how waging war goes much further than merely fighting on a battlefield with physical weapons.

For example, one can unjustly assassinate someone’s character just as much as gun them down with an AKM or M-16. That would just be a louder version of gossiping or slagging off someone behind their back. What really threw me was when I discovered some decades back that such assassinatory behaviour is rabidly prevalent in the Christian scene. I recall my first discovery of this in a church in the UK in 1989, where a man was being unjustly persecuted and badmouthed by the elders as part of their control-freak lordship. I requested to meet with them and ask them why they were behaving in such a way. (I knew the reason why. It was because they were jealous of the man’s superior knowledge and literary abilities. So many elders in churches are just immature tin-pot Hitlers with enough chips on their shoulders to create a log cabin). The net result of my meeting with those big little men was to bring myself under the same backstabbing campaign as the other guy had experienced. That was my introduction to what I eventually had to realise was an endemic issue in the Christian scene. Apostasy much? (Ironically, that guy went on to become a theology professor at a seminary! Justice served).

Here is the sonnet:

I’ve seen too much of death on this brief ride.
By “death” I don’t mean snuffing out of bones.
Well, not entirely (metaphor applied) —
decay is all around, with undertones.

For war can strike more than just through a gun
which, though not ‘death’ itself, might as well be.
For one can kill a soul more ways than one —
equivalent to death-throes agony.

A shock was seeing how this deadly spree
was merely one more way one then commits
assassination metaphorically,
despite confessing Christ — what hypocrites!

To strike another soul through word and plot
thus shows one’s provenance has been forgot.

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[Tomorrow, November 10th, Day #6, the penultimate day of the 7-day series, there will be a sonnet which shows that waging war goes much further than merely fighting on a battlefield with physical weapons. The title will be: “Killing Redefined”, about how toying with bellicose words in one of the ways of warmongers].

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© Copyright, Alan Morrison, 2025
[The copyright on my works is merely to protect them from any wanton plagiarism which could result in undesirable changes (as has actually happened!). Readers are free to reproduce my work, so long as it is in the same format and with the exact same content and its origin is acknowledged]

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