The toll of war
is not counted in victories,
but in mothers who forget how to laugh,
in children who learn the language of sirens
before they learn their own names.
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It is measured in ash
settling softly on cities that once sang,
on olive groves that whispered peace,
on the fragile idea that reason
might yet prevail.
And still, the drums beat.
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Who leads the mighty to the edge of ruin?
What gravity pulls an empire—vast, armed, assured
toward a narrow strip of earth,
a stubborn geography soaked in memory and myth?
A tiny piece of real estate,
yet heavy enough to bend history,
to drag giants toward their own undoing.
Is this how Armageddon begins
not with clarity,
but with conviction?
Power, we are told, is absolute.
Iron shields stretch across the sky,
missiles poised like gods of old,
interceptors whispering promises of invincibility.
But somewhere, unseen,
a cheap drone hums
a modern sling in the trembling hands of David.
It does not roar.
It confuses.
It slips through certainty,
turns precision into doubt,
and reminds Goliath
that armour is never as complete
as pride believes.
This is the limit of power:
not its inability to strike,
but its inability to understand
that not all threats are loud.
And yet
in the shadows of despair,
there are flickers.
Nations, small and resolute,
closing their skies like clasped hands in prayer,
refusing passage to death,
declaring in quiet defiance:
Not through us.
It is a fragile courage,
but courage nonetheless
a refusal to be complicit
in the choreography of destruction.
Still, the architects of ruin persist.
Old men
so old their bodies betray them,
their waists long since surrendered their perineal strength, their pipes atrophied,
their bladders emptied not by will,
but by gravity.
and yet they speak of annihilation
as though it were strategy.
They threaten fire that outlives generations,
dirty bombs that poison soil and sky,
as if the earth were not their inheritance too.
One wonders
what divine calculus allowed such men to rise?
Why were they not left
to smoulder in some forgotten corner of hell,
arguing endlessly with Lucifer
over who first conceived destruction?
Instead, they sit in polished rooms,
drawing lines that bleed,
deciding which lives are expendable,
which futures negotiable.
And the consequences ripple outward.
The Strait closes
not merely of water,
but of wisdom.
The Strait of Hubris.
Where arrogance narrows passage,
where oil and ambition choke the same artery,
where the world holds its breath
as commerce halts
and tension hardens into inevitability.
This is the great irony of war:
it promises order
but delivers only control.
Order forged through the barrel of a gun
is a brittle thing
it stands only as long as fear sustains it.
Justice, however
justice endures.
Without it,
every victory is temporary,
every empire a sandcastle
awaiting the tide.
War is not a solution.
It is an admission
that imagination has failed,
that empathy has been abandoned,
that power has mistaken itself for purpose.
And so we stand,
on the precipice of something vast and irreversible,
watching giants stumble
over the weight of their own certainty.
The question is no longer
who will win
but whether anything worth saving
will remain.
Osmund Agbo is a medical doctor and author. His works include Black Grit, White Knuckles: The Philosophy of Black Renaissance and a fiction work titled The Velvet Court: Courtesan Chronicles. His latest works, Pray, Let the Shaman Die and Ma’am, I Do Not Come to You for Love, have just been released. He can be reached through: [email protected].
