If a War is Raging Afar
Yu Guangzhong

If a war is raging afar, shall I stop my ears
Or shall I sit up and listen in shame?
Shall I stop my nose or breathe and breathe
The smothering smoke of troubled air? Shall I hear
You gasp lust and love or shall I hear the howitzers
Howl their sermons of truth? Mottos, medals, widows,
Can these glut the greedy palate of Death?
If far away a war is frying a nation
And fleets of tanks are ploughing plots in spring,
A child is crying by its mother’s corpse
Of a dumb and blind and deaf tomorrow;
If a nun is squatting on her fiery bier
With famished flesh singeing a despair
And black limbs ecstatic round Nirvana
As a hopeless gesture of hope. If
We are in bed, and they’re in the field
Sowing peace in acres of barbed wire,
Shall I feel guilty or shall I feel glad,
Glad that I’m making not war but love,
And in my arms writhes your nakedness, not the foe’s?
If afar there rages a war, and there we are—
You a merciful angel, clad all in white
And bent over the bed, with me in bed—
Without hand or foot or eye or without sex
In a field hospital that smells of blood.
If a war O such a war is raging afar,
My love, if right there we are.