Author’s Note

War is often framed through numbers – casualty counts, budgets, troop movements, strategic gains. But behind every statistic is a life, a family, a story that rarely gets told. Calculating Profits (Ledger of Lives) is a response to that reduction of humanity into arithmetic.

This poem confronts the uncomfortable truth that while war is frequently portrayed as a contest of nations, the consequences are carried by ordinary people. Civilians lose homes, children lose futures, and entire communities are reshaped by decisions made far from the battlefield.

The poem’s title references the cold language of accounting–ledgers, calculations, profits–to highlight how easily human suffering can be reframed as strategy or necessity. I wrote this piece to challenge the normalization of war as spectacle and to remind readers that the cost is never abstract. Every loss echoes through generations.

Sometimes poetry must be gentle.
Other times, it must speak plainly.

This poem chooses the latter.

— Rowan Evans

Calculating Profits (Ledger of Lives)
Poetry by Rowan Evans

I’m so sick of this, it’s ridiculous,
the way we glorify war like a sports game—fictitious.
Us vs Them, who’s gonna win?
While kids in rubble pray their lives begin.

Flags wave, bombs blaze, headlines spin,
nobody wins, but governments grin.
Life lost, life changed, families torn apart,
yet they call it “strategy,” cold as a heart.

Soldiers march, leaders sit in their chairs,
calculating profits while ignoring prayers.
Civilians flee, the streets taste of ash,
diplomacy dies in the bureaucratic clash.

Every life a number in a ledger they hide,
every tear a story the textbooks won’t write.
We cheer heroes in videos, oblivious, blind,
never realizing the price war leaves behind.

Us vs Them—what a childish game,
but it’s blood they gamble with, never their name.
I spit this truth, raw, without disguise,
because war is a lie, and I see through…

the why—
lies.

If you’re interested in more poetry, you can find it here → [The Library of Ashes]