THEY WERE

They were boys going over the top to die

in their tens of thousands in the mud of the Somme.

Nazi youth best in the world bar none,

proved wrong over wide steppes of Mother Russia.

Hurricane pilots fighting Japan over Ceylon, Burma, Imphal,

lost pilots barely 21 made men in lonely cockpits.

Red Chinese boys laid bare bone bloody

against Yankee lines, human wave failure.

In the jungles of Nam stoned Americans kill

more yellow men and women, want their youth

back more time to do drugs without time taken up by killing.

Falklands calling, Malvinas battle boys to men

8,000 miles from home, for Britain left many behind last colonial war.

Desert combat, boys to men now highly skilled killers

for oil and the engine. Today, where will it be next?

War calling more boys to be men, to quietly die

in combat or call for their mothers.

Fate will tell – now we wonder.

Boys finish school, part of the lottery of death crying

for more soldiers and innocents to die in death.

DESERT CLASH

 

A murky dust laden night gives way to a searing

hot day over the barren desert.

Sun glints off metal many miles away

as aerial knights rise to do battle.

The Tigersharks get ready to fight

the Eagles in the coming battle.

Suddenly it starts as missile trails

dance through the sky and jets

leave contrails in the humid upper air.

A flash registers a hit as a plane dies,

immortality now gained.

It’s an air war like no other

because the price is the world

as forces of good battle against Lucifer’s evil.

If we lose then our planet falls into death and

anarchy.

 

WAR

 

Man against man, brother against brother,

nation against nation in the titanic struggle

that is total war, death across the land,

missiles through the sky bringing megatonage murder

on a colossal scale.

Armageddon spreads her wings and now the screams

of the wounded and the damned echo across the deserts,

across the cities, across the oceans until silence falls

and death rules absolute – the winner every time.

 

Hate those religious zealots, burn their houses to the ground

and erase their memory. Airforce generals launch their planes

at distant targets, just a name on a map across the world.

Does he know that there are people there with families

and dreams? Snuffed out by the high explosive blast,

it has become obvious to me, we really aren’t civilised

at this point in time. War rules and mankind bows down,

picks up the gun, pushes the button to let the genie of death

ruin the land and kill even more. Will it ever end?

 

some plane/war type poems from my new plane poem book

 

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/aeroplane-related-poems-by-nick-armbrister/5650947