My name is Portugal Tuma and I'm really interested in war poetry.

The Irish poet Michael Lungley says that the war poems of the first world war were

decorated and honored but that he's really glad there isn't a lot of poetry from the

second world war because war should never be there to bring about poetry.

The poetry should be there to challenge and critique war.

War Wars by Nico Amador.

It started with a bang, some say a snap, then a watery isthmus, a primordial goo lipping

along under a purple steam.

Then pods shaped like violins, then fish, wishing themselves bigger fins, feet, then

pterodactyl, then mammoth, then ice and more ice, the long walk, the centuries in the

wilderness, the zig-zag wander, then a valley, then a lake, then the herd, the golden grain,

a maze of aqueducts singing their blues song, then a city bigger than Rome, pyramids,

a god some people called a hummingbird.

A hummingbird cannot be a man but man can learn to love a hummingbird, to go to war for

a hummingbird.

This bird was at war with the world and it et its enemies behind a curtain of roses

and the grasshoppers never set a word.

I heard Nico Amador read poetry at a festival in Madrid a few years ago afterwards I went

and searched out the rest of his poems that were published and when I read this poem,

Flower Wars in a book called Flower Wars I was just filled with delight because it was

recognizable to me as some kind of creation myth that incorporated evolution and incorporated

the big bang and then incorporated specifics about gods but those were unknown to me the

...