by Robert M. Chute
I tried to read the Iliad again.
No use: this veteran is too old, there've been
too many senseless wars since that brutal
exercise in classic pride and ego.
It was not the fabled face that launched those
thousand ships but a cuckold husband pride and
his bloody-minded brother's ego that set
the stage for a petulant teenager to
ease his peeve with slaughter as easily
as Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter.
To glamorize this Trojan war you might
as well pretend battling ten years to turn
Afghanistan to Kansas would have a
noble end and you'd return a hero —
when even Kansas isn't Kansas anymore.
Robert M. Chute's book of poetry based on scientific articles, Reading Nature, is available from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
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