For God and Country: A Villanelle

They say they waged a war to stop the war.
The coats and ties all sat and debated-
But that failed! So they made their bombs some more.

Oh what a sight; night skies glowing like days,
Once a great city now desecrated.
They say they waged a war to stop the war.

As armies set to march, men sat to pray;
And urged their ‘Heads’ in dread of the bloodshed.
But that failed! So they made their bombs some more.

One hundred and thirty thousand they say-
Nagasaki, Hiroshima; All dead!
They say they waged a war to stop the war?

That was a day of days…it paved the way;
For war ban treaties; accelerated…
But that failed! So they made their bombs some more-

To wipe out the Vietcong. Yet they say
For God and Country - Fight and march ahead.
They say they waged a war to stop the war…
But that failed! So they made their bombs some more.

The villanelle is a poetic form which has no established meter save ten syllables per line. It is nineteen lines long, consisting of five tercets and one concluding quatrain. The essence of this form is its distinctive pattern of rhyme and repetition. The rhyme-and-refrain pattern of the villanelle can be schematized as A¹bA² abA¹ abA² abA¹ abA² abA¹A² where letters ("a" and "b") indicate the two rhyme sounds, upper case indicates a refrain ("A"), and superscript numerals (¹ and ²) indicate Refrain 1 and Refrain 2.