Lessons of war from the dead

The dead have a message for us — one we keep refusing to listen to.

- Rethabile Masilo

The list of wars is so long that it dulls the senses.

(Image: Davinci.ai)

Across continents and decades, different voices that have been maimed or killed by the same wound are ignored. Gaza, Ukraine, Vietnam, Iraq, the US, Biafra: these are not separate stories so much as variations of one human failure.The poems mentioned here strive to show what remains after politics has done its work. They're the child who must carry what adults have broken, as it happens and has happened since the dawn of time. What is strange is that the child knows what heritage they were given, but will make little effort not to leave behind a different one.

Mahmoud Darwish’s Silence for Gaza emerges from common geography, and the moral landscape is familiar. Silence — here isn’t peace but enforced quiet, the hush that follows shelling, the muting of grief so routine that it no longer makes headlines. Darwish’s work has always insisted that occupation is not just land-linked but psychological: it trains the world to accept the unthinkable as background noise. War, the poem insists, doesn’t end when the guns stop. It displaces itself into children.

Written about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Yusef Komunyakaa’s Facing It

makes such interior occupation plain. The speaker stands before the wall, trying and failing to separate yesterday from today, the living from the dead. The denial fails almost instantly, and we can almost hear the speaker sobbing: the war, long declared over, continues to act on body and mind.