War without winners

War without winners

Those bleak Sundays burn us out of bed

with its dreary march of doings like the Russian army platoon.

Peace at war with ambition,

until the shrill of Monday sounds it call back to the trenches.

Then I wish it was Sunday, to play with my boy once more:

Too late.

Necessity calls us to attention

And greed fuels our fierceness

A war without maps

A war without winners

A war that never ends

Even after you retire to your tent at the end of the battle,

you live with the shame that you once left a mate dying,

or more than once heard someone crying

but never stopped to lend a hand, and instead mopped your brow

and walked bravely on.

(I wrote this poem in 2000 - after a year or so in Australia - and discovered it recently in a old document on a rainy Sunday afternoon. I think the topic is obvious, and it just seems an apt message during these tough times as we alll struggle to make sense of the constant demands of work on our lives; be it entrepreneur employee.)