The dead have a message for us about war, but we refuse to listen

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

Outlasting their motives

This is one of the most important lessons the mentioned poems share: wars do not stay in the closet they’re put in. They leak. They come out. They outlast the reasons they were fought for. Vietnam remains a wound on the psyche of Americans.

Olga Bragina’s poems about Ukraine bring this truth into the present tense (“when I arrive in Europe people there don’t understand what bombing is”). Her lines refuse heroic framing. Instead, they catalogue the absurdity of trying to live normally while missiles fall, marking survival as if it were a grim achievement unlocked.

This is what invasion does: it fractures time. The future becomes a conditional clause. Even hope is postponed – “one day it will end even the Hundred Years’ War ended” – a reassurance that sounds less like optimism than exhaustion.

Taken together, these poems force a question that history alone has yet to answer: are we making the same mistakes, or are we just trying not to see them as mistakes?

Since the end of World War 2, we have not entered an era of peace so much as an era of managed conflict, like Sisyphus finally getting the rock to the top and trying to keep it in place with a pebble. The task is repetitive, futile and unending. Wars have shifted from total global confrontation to persistent regional violence, proxy wars, occupations and “interventions”.

Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ukraine, Gaza and now Venezuela – the list is long enough to dull the senses. International law exists, but enforcement is selective. Each war is framed as exceptional, essential, inevitable. The repetition lies not only in the violence, but in the language used to justify it.

Justification and obfuscation

The US invading Afghanistan was framed as self-defence after 9/11, aimed at dismantling al-Qaeda and removing the Taliban. Iraq, however, was sold on false claims of weapons of mass destruction and vague insinuations of terrorist ties. The result was decades of regional destabilisation, millions of deaths and the normalisation of pre-emptive mass homicide.

Why did Barack Obama, alongside Nicolas Sarkozy, intervene in Libya in 2011? The stated aim was to protect civilians from Muammar Gaddafi under a UN-backed no-fly zone. The outcome was regime collapse without reconstruction, leaving Libya a fractured, militarised hub for human trafficking.

Why did Hamas attack Israel on 7 October 2023? The attack was rooted in decades of occupation, blockade and political despair in Gaza. None of that explains or excuses the killing of civilians or hostage-taking, but history matters... if one wants understanding rather than slogans.

Why did Benjamin Netanyahu respond with such noxious force? The justification was security and the elimination of Hamas. The result has been numberless civilian deaths, displacement and a catastrophe that echoes Darwish’s lament: “Gaza has no throat. Its pores are the ones that speak in sweat, blood, and fires.”

Why did Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine? The stated reasons of denazification and of protecting Ukrainians who speak Russian collapse under scrutiny. What Nazis? The real motives feed from imperial nostalgia, fear of democratic drift and resistance to Ukraine’s alignment with Europe. Bragina’s poems show what those abstractions mean on the ground: fear, exile and the slow ruin of ordinary life.

Is war ever necessary? Political theory allows for the possibility, but poetry exposes the cost. No poem will deny that threats exist, but many will deny that violence can be contained, controlled and morally sanitised.

So why so many wars? The answer suggested by these poems is uncomfortable in its simplicity. It’s us, though not all of us equally. War is decided by a few and endured by many. Komunyakaa warns us what happens when remembrance is avoided. Darwish names the silence that makes repetition possible. Bragina writes from inside the repetition, still waiting for it to end.

These poems offer testimony. And testimony, if taken seriously, demands change – not only in leaders, but in what we are willing to accept, forget, or explain away. If we keep making the same mistakes, it is because neglect is easier than mercy. DM

Rethabile Masilo is a Mosotho poet from Lesotho who lives in Paris, France.

Swimming

By Rethabile Masilo

I don’t know if my father could swim,

but that night, bullets hissing over his head,

he made it across the river into South Africa.

September clung to his pyjamas at the shins,

even as he hung to images he remembered –

us in family portraits, rising always left to right

on a staircase, up and up according to age;

he was my father even on that territory,

on foreign soil that speaks his tongue yet was alien to him.

Back home, we grouped around the dead boy then in state,

kissed, while he slept and dreamed, by a single bullet

that found his head, till neighbours came when dawn did

to help us place him in the ground in a shallow grave,

as is customary with my people, for his spirit to fly.

Mercy

By Tyehimba Jess

the war speaks at night

with its lips of shredded children,

with its brow of plastique

and its fighter jet breath,

and then it speaks at daybreak

with the soft slur of money

unfolding leaf upon leaf.

it speaks between the news

programs in the music

of commercials, then sings

in the voices of a national anthem.

it has a dirty coin jingle in its step,

it has a hand of many lost hands,

a palm of missing fingers,

the stump of an arm that it lost

reaching up to heaven, a foot

that digs a trench for its dead.

the war staggers forward,

compelled, inexorable, ticking.

it looks to me

with its one eye of napalm

and one eye of ice,

with its hair of fire

and its nuclear heart,

and yes, it is so human

and so pitiful as it stands there,

waiting for my hand.

it wants to know my answer.

it wants to know how i intend

to show it out of its misery,

and i only want it

to teach me how to kill.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.