Friday, August 30, 2013

On Syria/Remembering “Shock and Awe”


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.


1 comment:

  1. 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.
    -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.

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