Canakkale

Written for Rochdale's commemoration of Gallipoli this is, like my other war poems, not a celebration of courage and sacrifice (important as those things are) but an indictment of war itself and of the foolishness of the human race.

Canakkale Savasi

Where victory is no sweeter than defeat

A battlefield between the high ground

And the moral high ground

The beach and the hills

The gulf of belief between them

A stubborn separation of ideologies

Oceans or continents apart

Stripped-bare lands, smouldering and smoking

Drenched in blood

Canakkale

Where victory is no sweeter than defeat

Defeat the only exit

A battlefield of slow contrition

And lives wasting day by day

Where a quick death becomes preferable

To a slow-dying, slow-starving, forced-walk

Towards an impossible exile

And the victors loose the one thing that mattered

And with humanity destroyed, what was left?

Canakkale

Where victory is no sweeter than defeat

Where new countries emerge

With foundations of blood built on suffering

Again the blood flows from the high ground

With new hatred, new wars and new causes

And the pain echoes across another century

No celebrations nor commemorations

Nor pomp nor ceremony disguise

The days humanity faded

Gallipoli

Where victory is no sweeter than defeat

A battleground, named by the defeated

Remembered for butchery, for death

Defeat the only exit

Victory a lingering defeat

Surely no pride, only sadness

And a perpetual warning; ignored

Through blood soaked centuries

To humanity's peril