Dustin Pickering: War Poems

Credit, Lego ANIMASI, Screen Capture, Public Domain

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It is close to Easter 2026 and I learn that Pete Hegseth, the current Secretary of War for the United States, opened the Pentagon Chapel for Good Friday services. Oddly, his note inviting 3,500 employees indicated services were for Protestants only. While Catholics do not celebrate Good Friday with Mass, they do hold services and the Chapel has historically included them in services. The journalist who reported this change, Jennifer Bendery at Huffington Post, was subsequently pilloried by right-wing commentators who suggested she did not know anything about religion if she thought Catholics celebrated Good Friday. This rage fit from MAGA is yet another variety of their obscene push for Christian nationalism during a time of heated conflict with Iran. By portraying this war as the apocalypse, it frames what is clearly a secular struggle between global powers in religious terms to drudge the nation into fervor. President Trump’s spiritual advisor and senior advisor to the White House Faith Office, Paula White-Cain, even compared the president’s life to Jesus‘s own, “You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our lord and saviour showed us.” This same advisor once said that to say no to Trump was also to say no to God.

The exclusion of Catholics is not an accident. The Catholic clergy has been a major force of resistance against Trump’s inhumane immigration policies and Pope Leo XIV has spoken against the use of the Lord’s name to excuse the war in Iran. In Broadview, Illinois The Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership was denied entry to an ICE detention center last year to perform spiritual comfort services to the predominantly Catholic detainees. This year they managed to gain access to the detention facility where they expressed “shock” that immigrants had been detained in shackles, noting this was dehumanizing to their sensibilities.

Pope Leo XIV has become a vocal critic of Trump’s Iran War telling journalists recently, “Search always for peace and reject war.” He also noted destroying civilian infrastructure during war is against international law. This follows Trump’s April 7^th social media threat: “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” He has since walked back on this threat. However, The Free Press recently reported in Why the Vatican and the White House are on the Outs that a meeting in January between Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby and Vatican ambassador Cardinal Christophe Pierre involved threats against the Church to pressure them into accepting the “Donroe Doctrine”. Although some officials described the meeting as intense, the claim of threats has been disputed by both sides.

The heat during times of war and unrest gives ample room for muckruckers, partisans, and a variety of delinquents to sow discord and strife. We have no way to negotiate the carefully constructed reality before us as it becomes detached spectacle. As the Pentagon stacks so much of its religious community with influences like Doug Wilson, a self-described “paleo-Confederate”, and the president enacts his warped imperialist vision across continents, it is easy to feel the burn of exclusion. What powers brought us to this?

As a young man entering college, I became acquainted with the histories of Howard Zinn. My own stance against forceful robbery of space by one group over another, such as the Mexican-American War in 1846, and the usual seasoned excuses from “property rights” enthusiasts masking their ambitions within the context of nationalism, led me down a rabbit hole. In that rabbit hole I learned of the historical Slidell failure in 1845 during which John Slidell was sent by President Polk to negotiate with Mexico for the lands now known as New Mexico, California and Texas. Two Mexican presidents refused to see the ambassador at which President Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor into disputed territory to provoke a war. Historians regard Slidell’s ambassadorship to Mexico as an empty gesture in order to justify a war that was already planned.

Another example of United States’ hubris is the Vietnam War, an era largely thought to have contributed to the growing discontent with D.C. elites from the American public. The Gulf of Tonkin incident occurring August 2^nd,1964 was portrayed by President Lyndon B. Johnson as “unprovoked” to involve the USA in the war. The USS Maddox was in the Gulf to gather intelligence during US backed commando raids against North Vietnamese coastal installations when ships attacked the Maddox. A second attack days later was used to instigate the war, but NSA historian Robert Hanyok concluded in 2001 that intelligence was deliberately skewed by the agency to convince officials to go to war. Regarding the second attack President Johnson said, “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.” This is another instance of how conflicts stir confusion, leading to hasty decisions and dividing the public along lines of peaceniks and nationalistic apologists for the State.

So count me skeptical of Trump’s war games and the usual breed of military enthusiasts who believe war is the inevitable byproduct of a world jealous of American liberties. The Heritage Foundation’s 2026 Index of Economic Freedom ranks the United States as the 22^nd freest country, so what is there to be jealous of? We continue to argue that free market principles resolve all woes to the point of refusing to adapt a system of universal healthcare. Every developed country besides the United States has mandated healthcare for all citizens, and none of them are complaining about rising costs or inefficiencies. We also have the highest healthcare costs in the industrialized world. President Trump, the “no new wars” president, requested a defense budget of $1.5 trillion for 2027 as the federal debt spins out of control. We were told that deportations and ending Middle Eastern conflicts would increase wealth for the American public, yet we still do not have a functional healthcare system. In fact, in September 2025 Hegseth’s War Department spent upwards of $93.4 billion on high-end luxury items after the promise of cutting unnecessary government expenditures. The Pentagon has failed eight consecutive audits because the spending is so convoluted the funds cannot be accounted for.

These poems are meant to invoke the disunity of emotion that occurs during global unrest and wartime. People become divided between supporting the State and trying to reconcile the human sympathy for others under duress. Critics of America’s wars are often portrayed as raging anti-American lunatics in the order to discourage dissent. The fact is almost all Americans are fed up with our government for one reason or another. Randolph Bourne once wrote that “war is the health of the State.” Nothing solidifies the surveillance of citizens, the bankruptcy of the public purse, and the deepening of division like war. When utter violence, ruin, and the call for vengeance against rogue State actors annihilates any sense of justice and concern for the victims and civilians I must stand opposed. That market economies cannot be sustained without moral sentiments is a truism as far back as Adam Smith’s own elaborations. War kills the spirit and defies human goodness.

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Your eyes tell a story of light

but the darkness of dusk

obscures the corona

where winter parted my legs.

Nothingness slowly erodes the caving heart.

However my vanquished moments

discard the virginal ruins

like Hector’s body from Achilles’s chariot.

The Secret

Expire! These visions of my Heaven

never to find their Hell

of ceasing passions.

Empty flood into doors of Sodom

where our righteous soul unlocks eternity’s secret.

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Somnolence

Dark-haired god of war,

rivers and torrents of fire to embrace,

pestilence of dream

and irony ripped from slumbrous throat.

Field of fury and disguise,

tapestry bearing song and demise—

silent longing shadowed by class and horror—

built of ravage and State,

slate of commandment in the ugly brow.

What of it? Its shrill desperation,

the night embrace where letter of the law

folds into pages and pages of fear,

somnolence.

Fading generous bomb

of cold detached past,

knife to mythic throat

and callous eye—

this last remembrance.

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DUSTIN PICKERING is founder of Transcendent Zero Press. He has contributed writing to Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review, The Statesman (India), Journal of Liberty and International Affairs, The Colorado Review, World Literature Today, Asymptote Journal, and others. He is the author of numerous poetry collections and books including Salt and Sorrow. He placed in the top 100 for the Erbacce prize in 2021 and 2023, and was a finalist in Adelaide Literary Journal’s first short fiction contest. He was longlisted for the Rahim Karim World Prize in 2022 and given the honour of Knight of World Peace by the World Institute for Peace that same year. He hosts the popular interview series World Inkers Network on YouTube, and co-founded World Inkers Printing and Publishing.