On October 16th, 2026, on social media, I wrote these words: “Already I can feel it coming. Every year, in advance of so-called Remembrance/Armistice Day approaching on November 11th, I have a little shiver of darkness in my soul. It’s as if a curtain has been torn and a view has appeared into some forbidden territory where no human should tread. All the pomp, the ceremonial, the glorification of war and the gaslighting about how sweet and noble it is to die for one’s country. This tenebrous anticipation has happened for many years, ever since I read and comprehended the profound war poems of Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, who was senselessly killed in action at twenty-five years old just one week before Armistice Day, November 11th, 1918. Thus, for many years now, I have also written a war poem (or more) for each Remembrance/Armistice Day — though not to glorify war and extol the actions of those who have been the victims of it. Rather, my subjects are the emotional immaturity, the psychological manipulation, the political corruption, the barbarous power-games, and the sheer lack of true spirituality which inevitably lead to the outbreak of war”. Those were my words almost a month ago, and now I present to you below my recently-written war-poetry offerings for November 11th, 2026, consisting of a major poem framed by two sonnets. Here they are…

Opening Sonnet: “Penetrating the Curse”

In each November, just before this time,
I take my quill then pen some special verse.
It doesn’t have to be in tune or rhyme;
it simply has to penetrate the curse.

The curse of what? I hear my readers say.
The curse of war, of course: It’s everywhere.
Even if we fall to our knees and pray,
it’s always been, and always will be there.

The 11th hour of the 11th
day of the 11th month every year,
I feel the burden of the warful stealth
that’s inflamed by deception, greed, and fear.

The only way that I can deal with this
is to write a poem that’s sealed with a kiss.

So now here is that very poem, sealed with a kiss…😚

Poem: “The Mythologies of Valour”

Is it hypocritical to say with pseudo-piety, “We will remember them”,
just because a certain cold November day has come around again,
while at the same time tacitly or openly supporting warmongers,
apologists for genocide, when we should be wholly mortified
about the easy way that war is made — Divine law disobeyed —
human lives betrayed, wanton cruelty and murder on parade?

Governments move mountains to ensure that plastic caps
on bottles stay, pretending to care for the environment
while spending trillions on weapons, warfare, in the fray,
so that assorted psychopaths can have their wicked way
while milking the resources of a weaker nation in the mêlée.
Killing people is somehow seen as having a vertebrae.

These governments — mendacious machines, I call them —
say they have no money for caring community concerns.
Yet they, with ease, spend fortunes (dollars, pounds)
on anything which should be to human beings out-of-bounds;
by which I mean what kills or maims the body, soul or mind,
without a trace of legal, moral, ethical or honourable grounds.

Yes, acts of bravery & heroism have happened, that’s for sure,
in the trumped-up environments of politicians’ puppet-wars.
But using young men as “cannon-fodder” like worthless bait
wasted on the fronts of wars, to settle scores, used like whores
on desolate & distant shores, euphemistically known as “tours”,
despite the readiness to die for nought, is not a cause to celebrate
or, worse, to wear a contrived po-face so as to commemorate
the most corrupt of all the wars imaginable… with flowers!
Using lovely flowers to represent an ugly war is a way to gaslight us
into being sympathetic towards something which we should abhor.
When darkness masquerades as light to justify those who fight,
and evil disguises itself as good, all in the cause of nationhood,
then Woe to those who do so, for they have sealed their fate.

In former years, I’ve had so many thousand thoughts & words
about the scrambled mindset of the world which undergirds
the easy way that war is made. But now my words are spent.
Instead of like a waterfall, a torrent, with letters tumbling
from my normally prolific pen like confetti on a wedding day,
I have to wring them rawly from my soul which heavy lies
amidst the strangled cries of innocent women, children, babes,
the victims of this earth’s incessant and repugnant genocide,
which evil war-men try to hide, about which they have all
without a trace of conscience studiously lied, even denied.

It has been said that “truth is always the first casualty of war”.
But I would say that long before that casualty occurs,
another one preceded it — and that, my friends, is love.
For love & truth are moral twins & where such love is not,
then truth is always the first casualty of the lack of love,
and war will always soon ensue wherever truth is not.
A handy definition of all war is this: The Absence of Love.
Those who have true love embedded in their souls
could not make war because they are too busy making love,
while warmongers are busy making war, sending youngsters
off to die like cattle, as it was in 14-18 more than 100 years ago,
to fight the battles which political types are far too cowardly
2 fight themselves. They keep away from raining down of shells.

In those four years of grisly butcherings, 7 billion rounds
of the Ball Cartridge Mark VII variant were manufactured
for the .303-type rifle used by all British combatants.
“The two-piece composite core enabled its back half to be
made of lead-antimony alloy which shifted the center of
gravity toward the rear, enabling the bullet to thereby
tumble along and thus twist violently upon impact,
inflicting devastating, often unsurvivable, combat wounds”.
And all for what? Aristocratic alliances and political games
using boys as fodder, to the countries leaders’ eternal shame.
22 million deaths. A generation of trauma, anguish, grief.
The capstone being disillusionment and spiritual disbelief.

Why commemorate a warcrime (though never admitted
as such) which is truly what World War One always was?
When teenage boys were forced, on pain of being shot,
to go ‘over the top’ and die for nothing, while the generals
sipped their sherry on the lawn. Those boys were pawns,
with neither rooks nor queens nor kings nor bishops
to protect them from being taken off the chessboard —
victims of these criminalsome influences untoward,
to expire screaming loudly in the dark putrescent mud,
being hit by a damned bullet in the chest with a great thud,
swimming desperately in a gurgling pool of their own blood,
yet, later from that ground would spring some buds,
as poppy-fields bled out on all the land… and shrugged.

Even WW2 could in the earliest stages have been stopped;
but appeasement meant that interventions were dropped.
As usual, vested interests ensured war-footing would progress,
while US banks & companies did business with the Nazi Reich,
for money always must come first which is why they acquiesce,
amidst all the puffed-up pretensions to be statesmanlike.
No matter which war you wish to throw at me as being “just”,
the corruption in them means in your judgement I cannot trust.

In that harrowing old movie known as “Harrison’s Flowers”
(the warful realism of which does truly chill the soul,
though that, I confess, was plainly the director’s goal),
it was said by Yeager Pollack (alias the actor, Elias Koteas),
“There are only two different types of people in this world:
Those who have seen the war, and those who haven’t”.
A truer word could not be said. Once you have witnessed war
first-hand and upfront, you can never be the same again.
You will be irreparably altered from within, scarred and seared,
marred & speared by a rusty blade, which by a demon’s hand
was conjured up and made, from which recovery can only be
conveyed by a miracle or a compassionate touch from God.

So spare a tender thought for those who have returned
from war as broken beings in body but especially in mind,
unable to find a way to live as they once did, who now
are found on Skid Rows all across the globe, the dirty secret
no one wants to probe, who underneath the radar have slid
(who governments secretly wish could be permanently hid)
&, like Humpty-Dumpty, no one can put them together again.

There is a vast disconnect between what’s been done in the past
and what exists in the present. We build the mythologies of valour
to justify atrocities and whitewash savageries employed in war.
We make out it’s a sweet and noble thing to die for one’s country
when that country (or, rather, its government) is corrupt to the core.
The lads who “left-right!” march their way to fronts across the globe —
sent to their deaths as unwitting whores to patriotic lure —
have brainwashed been to such extent that they will never probe
the truth that lies behind all wars: That they are dreadfully impure.

When you say with pride the words, “For God and country!”,
you presume you fight God’s wars. But that presumptuous
statement defies all of God’s laws. Divine warfare in this age
has nothing whatsoever to do with what is known as patriotism
(which is no more than cheap jingoism dressed up to the nines).
Linking Nationalism to spirituality is like mixing WD40 with honey.
Needless to say, those behind it all are the ones with the money.
Money-people make war, for war is good business, begetting more.
The arms manufacturers, the bankers, and whores of many sorts
see $$$ signs in the unnecessary deaths of their ill-fated cohorts.

True war is spiritual, not fought with bombs & guns in uniforms
[for the heedless heartless use of war defies all moral norms]
but, rather, “to destroy the strongholds of human reasoning
and personal speculations and opinions which are lifted up
against the knowledge and truth of God and taking captive
every thought which is not in sincere obedience to the Christ”
who, for the love of His people, His life He gladly sacrificed.
This is the warfare which the world in ignorance cannot wage,
which is why it is so mired in fleshly ways and has no clue
about the fiendish, infernal, diabolic, brutal, hellish backcloth
to every human war, which they in all their ignorance ignore.

The kingdoms of this world have all been founded on brutality,
whether Babylonian, Assyrian, Mauryan, Graeco-Roman, Mongol,
Timurid, Aztec, British, Belgian, Hispanic, Portuguese, American,
Japanese. Anywhere that power-mad politics, rampant warfare,
rigid control, and unmitigated evil have forced themselves in blood
upon the hoi polloi, a brutal colonial legacy hangs in that nation’s
rancid air like fireful filigree while its leaders speak of peace with
po-faced expressions at cenotaphs and ironic memorials of war,
wearing blood-coloured poppies, intoning “We will remember them”,
when in truth they forgot them as soon as they had killed them.
[Peace for such folks is just the empty space between two wars].
Five minutes later, they issue a decree to bomb some other country
“back 2 the stone-age” for its oil & other spoil. Where is the outrage?

On November 11th, we are gaslit by pomp and ceremonial solemnity
in a cheap masquerade to cover up the fact that so many have died
in vain, for political gain. Yet this day is all one big dose of Novocaine
to numb the brain, to cover up the stain, or else the mums and dads
of the boys who died — on realising that they died for nought,
that it was in vain for which they as victims of the lies had fought —
would go stark raving mad, berserk, beside themselves, insane.

So let us no more romanticise the destructive death-cult of war.
For all we are doing is concealing the evisceration and the gore,
to make it all sound palatable, wholesome, and righteously sure.
We vote for “leaders” who are criminally insane, clowns in suits,
devoid of truth and inhumane, with no clue how to settle disputes.
Political lives are inevitably adversarial and confrontational —
a breeding ground for war. It’s like a law; & they are SO immature!
Catcalling one another all the time, laughing at or shouting down
the ‘opposition’, like tiny children in a nursery, a cast of clowns.
War is who they are, suits with concealed guns, not in their hands
or in a holster or in a pocket or in a drawer, but in their hearts.
For the sickness known as “politics”, there can never be a cure,
as there are no men among them, just predation, a sick lion’s roar.

You may wonder why they want to get you into all this poppy stuff
so much that not to wear one is seen as treacherous — a traitor
to ideals of the state, casting shadows on the memory of ‘the fallen’.
It’s because that state needs you sympathetic to its bellicose cause
so you’ll willingly sign up for all its manipulative wars, a stooge
2 risk your life for all the spoil they hope 2 gain: some new terrain,
or to win an ideological campaign. They do not care if you are slain,
for you are expendable, glibly cited as needful ‘collateral damage’.
Even now they are making noises about what you need to store,
in the event of a war (while clearly citing Russia as the adversary),
then raising the eligible age of conscription to pensionable years,
they want you draped in fears, as willing bombardiers, who cheer
the ‘king’s own’ on, & if it’s shown you could be heroes in the field
then to the state your lifeblood U will fulsomely & effortlessly yield.

Why would U wear a lovely poppy if your life’s geared up for war,
believing propaganda & voting for people with red flags galore?
You bring war on this world by falling for the lies and promises
made by villains who rely on your willing compliance, submission,
acquiescence, passivity. It all ends up on the cold slab of a mortician.

If folks for just one little minute stopped all their bustling brains,
their obsession with personal gains, while always remaining in
their selfish, ruthless, blinkered, exclusive, separate little lanes,
and instead discovered the One who truly ruly rightly justly reigns
in spite of all our trivial little goals, our most corrupted souls,
and all the silly little holes we dig just for our ruthless petty selves
(those trenches that we plough on all our poppy-laden battlefields)
and see instead how we’ve missed the whole point of being alive
and how we thereby egotistically contrive to see our shallow selves
only in terms of what we do and say, rather than who we really are…
there would be no more tussles and scuffles, scraps and skirmishes,
quarrels and strife, feuds and discords, conflicts and wasted wars.

Instead of all this pomp & po-faced posing on just 1 day every year,
when war is who we are & underneath the swathe of serious faces
are dead souls insincere, whose lives are ruled by crippling fear,
to madness do adhere, in remembrance of decomposedful corpses,
lauding brute opposing forces, which war and combat reinforces,
let us discover who the Source is of all the living flesh and bone
we’ve killed into the earth, our hearts we’ve turned to lifeless stone,
the peace that we’ve postponed, the enemies we’ve overthrown,
and the whole grand point of life that we have wilfully, designedly,
deliberately, malignedly, contrivedly, intentionally never known.

By all means, defend your land (or castle) against marauders,
and not because from some billionaires you are taking orders.
But inventing pretexts with a view to waging a trumped-up war
for motives which are ulterior rather than noble and pure
against a land merely to rape and plunder for gain or spoil,
is not what such a costly (in life and love) campaign is truly for.
Any decent human from such rampant exploits surely must recoil.

I loathe all forms of evil, amorality, hypocrisy, falsity, dissembling,
deception, fakery, mendacity, cant, and all corruption, to be sure;
these are what will fuel all the conflicts to be waged for evermore.
I say all this as one who cannot be described as merely “antiwar”;
but to fight against another and kill them is not what life is for.

Closing Sonnet: “God’s Own Fireball”

That “evermore” does not mean eternal.
It’s only “evermore” within this age.
For though this age is indeed infernal,
beyond its end there’ll be no warring rage.

Wars and rumours of them (part-and-parcel
of this entire age) will still be with us
until then, for war is unsolvable
in a world which is so iniquitous.

But do not be fazed by all this war-stuff,
as if it never will be brought to heel.
For Jesus is returning, sure enough,
with Armageddon… then the war gets real!

Then all the missile silos, bombs and all,
will be destroyed in God’s great fireball.

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© Copyright, Alan Morrison, 2026
[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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