Mourners hold a portrait of a students during a funeral ceremony for children, who lost their lives after a primary school in Iran’s Hormozgan province was targeted in US and Israeli attacks, on March 03, 2026 in Minab, Iran [Anadolu/ Agency]
By Jim Aitken
Do not be fooled by the classical title.
The straw-haired clown who started the war
is a man much more akin to Homer Simpson
than to the author of the Iliad.
The epic that came out of ancient Greece
has been much reduced in cultural terms
to nothing more than a McDonald’s menu,
the extent of the straw-haired man’s reading.
As for the fury he and his buddy unleashed
it was not for any justice that had been traduced
but, as before, for the black gold they possess
for the god he worships is the god of Mammon.
He and his buddy do not care about the people
they bomb, the destruction they create, they
seek to award the contracts to rebuild what
they have destroyed, as in Gaza and in Iraq.
Crude gunslingers causing havoc with others
and creating many others to loathe them more
as more migrants will start fleeing the aftermath
to be reviled by the ‘free nations’ saying, ‘We’re full.’
This is no epic conflict testing new high-tech systems,
no Gatling guns against bows and arrows, this is
crude gunslinging of a new frontier in the wild West
and the furies may yet drive the crude gunslingers mad.
