Grass

The battles that the “grass” mentions symbolize at once humanity’s propensity for war and its collective, willful ignorance, specifically its inability or refusal to learn war’s pointlessness.

For historians and military strategists, these battles from three different wars epitomize epic conflict. They embody the heroic ideal of one grand army pitted against another in a showdown over ideals, the defense of the values that define one nation against that which would destroy those values. For the poet, using the grass that will come to cover these grand soundstages for these grand battles reveals that these battles symbolize not heroic conflict but rather pointless brutality. After all, now nearly two centuries after the rise and fall of Napoleon and more than a century after the barbaric stalemate at Verdun, these battles that seemed titanic at the moment are little noted.

The steady work of the grass, upcycling battle sites into cow pastures and woodlands, only serves to help humanity forget the bloody realities of the battles and in turn tidy up the history that will be written, ensuring humanity’s continuing obsession with wars. Thus, these battles symbolize the fatal, endless repetition of history caused by humanity’s refusal to learn.