Crimson Plains

 

 

History,

     Is crimson with tales of battle

Be you friend or foe,

Honours and ridicule,

Courage and cowardice,

     Yet nobody mentions the detail –

All carnage of limbs ripped from a

Warriors soul.

 

            Studio’s of money

Glorify the dead, make sentient

The brave killing a brother,

                                    The wide angled

Lenses show the brief encounter of lovers,

But the truth in the picture is denied

From view,

 

            Bullet holes and stab wounds,

Morbidity under a soft light,

Gives credence to violence and a Man

Believes himself brave trusting only his

Rifle that sways at his side

          And listens not to the young

Of his years, that - ‘quiet’ a voice

That whispers of reason –

The child within - mocking murder

For treason, these rules of engagement -

Turning comrade’s a corpse.

 

            The Light Brigade flounders

As the Australian gallops Gallipoli,

And Kwazulu Natal bears the ghosts

Of the Gatlin; streaming in rivers

From spears against guns,

Those pilots whose pulse becomes Zero

And the special in shadows whom

Nobody knows,

            All speak of courage but

Boasting with ridicule is an entity fanned,

All murder in miles of miles and miles –

The cadaver comes conscious only of death;

            A misunderstanding of how we were born,

As medics lay siege to

A hospitals bleed and Mash

Speaks the suicide we secretly know.

 

            There are no tales of Glory from deep

Within ranks, for those that were there know

This fear of biology that hosts like a cage –

The soul we should own,

For the discomfort of Being be our own

Disrespect;- if aiming a rifle to

                        Gun a Man down.

                                   All history we know

Here on Earth is written in blood.

 

            Locks can be thrown

Opening chasms of hope,

As a hand of respect extends

          Only a friend,

And the choice of the past

Can be buried so deep;

The disgust that has nowhere to go,

            And all Spears and Swords,

                         Rifles and mortars,

                         Arrows and Axes

                         Missiles and Bombs

Are the lie before truth,

For this past stagnation

That turns the new to the old

The Good to the Bad

Is the denial of the Peace that we seek

For The World bearing witness –

While this murder remains

Will still until death,

Know not where or when to begin.  

 

Michael J Waite 7^th July 2011.