Aptitude and madness flew together,
creating irregular arcs of
light in night.
Pilots winged without
sleep
and with crazed eyes and
clenched toes.
Jets rumbled with fevers
of impatience.
The armchair commanders
said,
“The world could wait no
longer.”
So they rushed into the
unknowable,
and the world was tilted
by an invasion,
choking with fiery air.
We were never shown unspeakable shocks:
mutilations and murders.
But we were awed by broadcasts
of sorties unleashing
raucous skies,
leaving behind in their
wake
bursts of death and
torrents of terror.
How was it to live among
Blitzkriegs
of shattered glass and
concrete,
sirens and foreboding
clouds
of hydrogen sulfide?
When they dropped their
payloads,
smoke rose from behind
upturned thumbs.
A version of “On Syria/Remembering ‘Shock
and Awe’” was originally published in Prairie Light Review and with a different
title.
If some foreign country dropped a bomb that killed my child in America for the sake of humanity, law & order, the status quo and peace on earth, I would never forgive or forget. Knowing my personality. I would dedicate my life to getting the killers who deliver generalized death from the air while enriching the coffers of the international Military-Industrial Complex.
ReplyDelete-Ken
George Carlin wrote about the insanity of condemning a country that kills with chemicals rather than shrapnel, flamethrowers, cluster bombs, landmines, bayonets, slow torture, and all the usual stuff. That is now being sold to us yet again as the high-minded rationale to kill at random from the air. There is no bomb smart enough to protect children, pets and other innocents from its blast.