War - What It's Good For

War creates the ambience
that ratifies the noble pose,
the patriot’s granitic stance,

reliably enriches those
whose business is to arm the nation,
men whose faces no one knows.

Periodic devastation
gives us something to restore;
it checks the excess population,

occupies the idle poor,
makes them useful citizens,
better than they were before.

But war is chiefly useful when
the routine horrors fail to stop
the women laughing at the men.