PAD Day 26: The War Goes On

 Today's prompt from NaPoWriMo is to write an "epic simile" in the style of the classic poets, like Virgil or Homer. That is, write a simile that continues through several lines for dramatic buildup and effect. It seems the old guys often used a large-scale event, like war or encounters with gods, as a basis for similes of this kind of scope. So that's what I did, using a perhaps unlikely simile comparing war to a kind of destructive construction or reclamation project, the kind that takes bulldozers and heavy equipment against everything in its path. I used a form that my friend Vince Gotera used yesterday, a kind of haibun, but with prose and a tanka instead of a haiku. I also used the weekly word bank from The Sunday Whirl as an additional challenge. The word bank, obviously taken from text about the Ukraine War, was: next, mass, earth, war, color, cloud, reject, kill, suffering, trenches, search, and forgive. 

The Clearance 

He looks at it like a contractor, like it's his reclamation project, that he has the right of way to bulldoze or seize what he thinks is rightfully his, to rebuild the "good old days" of the Union. But they have other ideas, having gained their freedom from his caprices and his iron hand. He fires up the machines, the steamrollers and earth movers, but first he sends in the demolitions team, huge missile sledgehammers bashing into and through apartments, into schools, into hospitals, churches, train stations, anywhere that ordinary citizens gather or huddle for safety. To kill is the objective, long-term suffering the goal. Clouds of black and red smoke, the color of death and evil, roil over the skyline. Steamroller tanks crush everything they can roll over and shoot everything they can't. Trenches and mass graves appear in almost every city. When nothing is left erect in one city, the Contractor swings the wrecking ball around to the next, while survivors search the rubble, picking through rocks to find their valuables or maybe their missing family. The Contractor rejects any talk of a stop-work order in the name of peace. He can't forgive the temerity of these people to refuse his rule, and the only option in his mind is a total clearance of them and their land, whatever that may mean, the ordinances of  the world be damned. But he didn't count on their resolve to stand up to him, the ruthless robber baron. 

                                                War is a steel shell
                                                around our hearts, our souls,
                                                our humanity.
                                                We vilify the other
                                                or it would have no purpose.

The second prompt, from Write Better Poetry, was to write a "love/anti-love" poem. I didn't combine the prompts because this prompt was posted later in the day, after I had written the war poem. This poem is in the form called the kimo, and it's also timely, in its own way:

Positively in Love
 
to say I love you, I keep my distance―
no touch, no kiss, a masked smile,
but you can see my eyes