We women teach our little sons how wrong <br />And how ignoble blows are; school and church <br />Support our precepts and inoculate <br />The growing minds with thoughts of love and peace. <br />‘Let dogs delight to bark and bite, ’ we say; <br />But human beings with immortal souls <br />Must rise above the methods of the brute <br />And walk with reason and with self-control. <br /> <br />And then – dear God! you men, you wise, strong men, <br />Our self-announced superiors in brain, <br />Our peers in judgement, you go forth to war! <br />You leap at one another, mutilate <br />And starve and kill your fellow men, and ask <br />The world’s applause for such heroic deeds. <br />You boast and strut; and if no song is sung, <br />No laudatory epic writ in blood, <br />Telling how many widows you have made, <br />Why then, penforce, you say our bards are dead <br />And inspiration sleeps to wake no more. <br />And we, the women, we whose lives you are – <br />What can we do but sit in silent homes <br />And wait and suffer? Not for us the blare <br />Of trumpets and the bugle’s call to arms – <br />For us no waving banners, no supreme, <br />Triumphant hour of conquest. Ours the slow <br />Dread torture of uncertainty, each day <br />The bootless battle with the same despair. <br />And when at best your victories reach our ears, <br />There reaches with them to our pitying hearts <br />The thought of countless homes made desolate <br />And other women weeping for their dead. <br /> <br />O men, wise men, superior beings, say, <br />Is there no substitute for war in this <br />Great age and ere? If you answer ‘No’ <br />Then let us rear our children to be wolves <br />And teach them from the cradle how to kill. <br />Why should we women take waste our time and work <br />In talking peace, when men declare for war?<br /><br />Ella Wheeler Wilcox<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/woman-and-war/
