Terry Savoie

Concerning the War

Terry Savoie

How we fought day & night, fought over the war without

any end in sight, fought in our all-night bull sessions as though

that non-stop wrangling might render us something

more meaningful than those endless cups of coffee we drank

designed to drown out our rage, our guilt.

But our hearts? Yes, they beat on but the argument ended up going

nowhere beyond eating us alive as all wars must inevitably do

before they shuffled off to swallow the next generation & the next.

Today,

fewer than half of us remain who lived

through that talking. Looking back, we wonder now

at still being here while running on those tired & nearly spent fumes,

fumes fated as we always seem to be with beginning over again & again &, yes, once again.

Terry Savoie lives in Iowa. Beyond a previous appearance in Tipton Poetry Journal, more than four hundred poems have been published in journals both here and abroad. These include APR, Ploughshares, America, Prairie Schooner, The Minnesota Review, The Montana Review, North American Review, Sonora Review and The Iowa Review.