Dave Bonta's "Divisive" is a short, bitter poem about how war works like a faith. The opening image, "church of war / like a mad rose," makes it something beautiful and sacred-looking on the surface, but wild and unhinged underneath. A rose is lovely and also thorny, and "mad" suggests that this devotion has lost all reason.
The second stanza turns to the idea of division. When people split into camps, the speaker suggests, we don't achieve anything for ourselves. We simply "gratify / this or that god," feeding whichever cause demands our loyalty. The casual "this or that" makes the gods feel interchangeable, as if the side hardly matters.
The last stanza sounds like a prayer, but an ironic one: "give us more of the same / half-lives." Judging by the tone, the speaker is mocking our willingness to accept diminished, partial lives. The mood is weary, sharp, and quietly angry, and the poem's brevity makes its accusation feel blunt.