What War takes- People by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

No people are uninteresting.

Their fate is like a chronicle of planets.

Nothing in them is not particular,

and planet is dissimilar from planet.

And if a man lived in obscurity

making his friends in that obscurity

obscurity is not uninteresting.

To each his world is private,

and in the world one excellent minute.

And in that world one tragic minute.

These are private.

In any man who dies there dies with him

his first snow and kiss and fight.

It goes with him.

They are left books and bridges

and painted canvas and machinery.

Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also nothing:

by the rule of the game something has gone.

Not people die but worlds die in them.

Whom we knew as faulty, the earth creatures.

Of whom, essentially, what did we know?

Brother of brother?   Friend of friends?

Lover of lover?

We who knew our fathers

in everything,  in nothing.

They perish.    They cannot be brought back.

The secret worlds are not regenerated.

And every time again and again

I make my lament against destruction.

People starts out by stating that "no people are uninteresting" a fact I believe to be true. All individuals are complex; all have aspects that are not revealed simply by the color of their skin, their geographical location or the God they choose to worship. We keep it to ourselves and possibly even prefer it that way. When a man is killed in the name of the "cause" it allows disconnect from the truth. A reality that in fact it is not a troop, an innocent by stander, terrorist, freedom fighter, gang member, drug dealer, prostitute, Muslim, Christian, Jew, black man or white woman. When a person loses their life to unnecessary violence, the human they were, the existence they knew and world they experienced is gone forever. What is left behind- their material world as they created it. It is real and possibly permanent. What has died will never be again and what they have lost is also our loss. What Yevshenko says so well with the words in people- If we closed the gap between our actions of destruction to feel the reality of the people behind this destruction- the life, a love, the opportunities to change the world we would likely be unable to kill People.