Charles Simic, if known at all is usually known as a poet.  Born in Belgrade, Serbia, then part of Yugoslavia, he came to the U.S. with his family at the age of sixteen.  A winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and twice more a finalist, his work is recognized for its imagery and its exploration of wide ranges of the human experience.

He is also an essay writer, of great force and passion.  This, Our Wars, Our Victims, appeared in the New York Review of Books blog along with the March 19, 2015 issue of the magazine.

What has always amazed me about countries at war is the way the killing of the innocent in foreign lands is ignored. People who wouldn’t step on an ant at home have no interest in finding out what horrors their country is perpetrating abroad. This heartless attitude becomes even more offensive when one thinks back to those terrified people in New York running through fire and smoke from the collapsing towers. In the days after the attacks, our pundits and politicians clamored for a quick and brutal retaliation that would not be overly concerned with distinguishing the innocent from the guilty. In other words, let’s just start bombing the bastards and not worry about who gets killed—or about the likelihood that the bombed might want to have their own revenge one day.

Things will never be the same in this country people kept saying after September 11, and that has proved to be true. What hasn’t changed is our belief that we can eradicate evil in the world. We’re more likely to see the Taliban shave their beards and let their wives and daughters wear miniskirts than our own leaders break their addiction to militarism. Accordingly, there is no thought given in Washington to the harm our engagement in the Middle East and elsewhere has done to the societies and countries we have attacked, nor to what has caused the hatred and the desire for vengeance against us in the Muslim world. In our version of history, the September 11 hijackers who brought so much tragedy to so many people did what they did and went to their deaths because they loathed our freedoms and our values, while the tragedies we have caused in other countries are nothing more than the collateral damage of our sincere effort to liberate those countries.

Read all, here.

For more of Simic’s work, poetry, book reviews and essays at NYRB, go here. Many require a subscription — which is money well spent.

For poems to read on-line

Paradise Motel

Millions were dead; everybody was innocent.
I stayed in my room. The President
Spoke of war as of a magic love potion.
My eyes were opened in astonishment.
In a mirror my face appeared to me
Like a twice-canceled postage stamp.

I lived well, but life was awful.
there were so many soldiers that day,
So many refugees crowding the roads.
Naturally, they all vanished
With a touch of the hand.
History licked the corners of its bloody mouth.

On the pay channel, a man and a woman
Were trading hungry kisses and tearing off
Each other’s clothes while I looked on
With the sound off and the room dark
Except for the screen where the color
Had too much red in it, too much pink.

Here, and here.