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The good-for-business wars

Buying [we’re called consumers: what do
we really consume?] things we don’t need
with money we don’t have. Credit cards
weren’t invented for our convenience.

That’s the American Way troops are sent
to defend in lands where we don’t know
their language, march through their
customs, bitch about their religions.

Most people now can’t even find Kansas
on a map; Afghanistan might as well
be on the moon or in some god’s hell.
Their corpses we see on television

lack faces as well as names. We
count our own dead but won’t allot
money to talk nightmares from brains
of those who made it out. Who can

remember a time when we weren’t
at war someplace? No one in power
cares that we haven’t won a war
in seventy years. Still we invade.

When the same mistake is made over
and over, it isn’t always stupidity. Some
times it means that every cooked-up
invasion earns some people billions.

Marge Piercy is the author of many books of poetry, most recently Made in Detroit.

2020, Volume 72, Issue 02 (June 2020)
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