Peace and Quiet, Hard Won

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

Today’s poem was first published in Poetry Monthly International, August 2009 [A UK poetry journal, discontinued in 2008] and subsequently in my collection the following year. 

Now, it is not only courage and a sense of duty on which the professionalism of men and women around the world fighting for peace and justice turns but also - perhaps especially - discipline. While no poem of mine can hope to do them justice, I felt it appropriate in this instance to employ the discipline of a villanelle

On the face of it, every war and conflict has its winners and losers. Yet, to win or lose is rarely as simple as victory or defeat. Whatever, is it not to the world's everyday heroes fighting for a better, kinder, safer, world - while being moved about on this or that Battle Front like pieces on a chessboard by those more concerned with playing power games - to whom humanity owes the greater debt?

Most of us enjoy peace and quiet at times when we can be reflective about people and places dear to us, past and present, escaping (if only temporarily) from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. We should reflect, too, on those men and women to whom we owe such precious moments, so many of whom suffered injury and death so that (hopefully) their people might (eventually) live in peace and quiet; something of which (far) too many in this world of ours can (still) only dream.

PEACE AND QUIET, HARD WON

On old Memory Lane, all is quiet

for those who fought a war to end war

so we may make our peace with it

Among cries of the fallen, a shout,

(At ‘em lads, at ‘em, that’s the score!)

On old Memory Lane all is quiet

They bear old age, faces firmly set

to do them proud who had gone before

so we may make our peace with it

We will (all) be forever in their debt

whose ghosts haunt some foreign shore;

on old Memory Lane all is quiet

Time passes, defying us all to forget

those bent on exposing a greater horror

so we may make our peace with it

War, war, war, and still more of it yet;

on the landscape of love, a weeping sore;

on old Memory Lane, all is quiet

so we may make our peace with it

Copyright R. N. Taber 2009; 2016

[Note: An earlier version of this  villanelle appears in On the Battlefields of Love by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2010.]