The Age of War For most of a life now long enough to be half buried in history, the country, half-despairingly, I call my own— half-decadent, half-barbarian, and wholly crass— has been, above all things, at war. Not only the kind that bleeds headlines. A frigid civil war, scar of a hot one long ago, between a party drunk on virtue and another, aggrieved and vengeful. A war between races, nations, tribes, for which will tyrannize the seven continents. A war between generations as callous adulthood sends its children to the slow death of lack of enough money, or drones and killing. A war of the rich on the rest of us, rooted as old as time now a monstrosity beyond obscenity. A war between the sexes whipped into a frenzy; a war man and woman refuse either truce or loss. War on war on war across decades I do not wish to count— at times almost about to gamble a cagey ceasefire, only to be pulled underground in cunning retreat, like a wild fire that forever burns, threatening at points that cannot be known to claw and tongue into the air again and sweep away to ashes the wilderness of mankind. I do not see an end to them. Perhaps they cannot end: perhaps they are as old as mad, foolish humankind, and so they will end only with the last human sigh. And so they are tearing us to pieces.
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Christopher Bernard’s book The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. His latest book of poetry, appearing in the fall of 2025, is The Beauty of Matter.