From the embers
a Christ-like figure appeared
his arms outstretched covered in the dust of entrails,
his beard salted with the ashes of crimson tears
a voice slashed in violet pale.
An aftermath of singed art and culture
a firestorm on the Florence on the Elbe,
we saw the crumbling factories on dark TV,
not a squadron of refugee children
playing in paper-wick houses.
Now a city that barely exists
charred monsters have swept its citizens,
where one monstrous mask recreates another
in the vertigo found through mutual sorrow.
We watched in front rooms on Wendy-house screens
a black and white mushroom emerge
like a fountain of souls embracing the reaping
we amassed the innocent as casualties of war.
In the radioactive rubble of Hiroshima
unknown graveyard of children’s shattered doll-heads,
the loss of tragic prisoners of circumstance,
citizen of war-poor Eden’s child of horror.
Fatal breath from man’s genocide
a pure wavering mist of legitimate terror,
dark presence born in the players of Armageddon,
washing long cloaks of deathly providence
as a little boy played and a fat man bounced
in skies of magnolia, we gasped on screens of cloudy grey.
Never to question the death toll of innocent civilians,
through the camera’s blooded age
the slaughtered face had changed its mask,
to horror and rape of fallen Berlin,
to murder camps of whirling napalm.
Sickly landlords of worldly crusades
citizens will stand tall in unison,
humming an anthem of a world that divides,
and face the monsters that discourage them.
With one camera’s biased view we accept atrocity
for the greater good, as a Christ-like figure reappeared
as a citizen of the uprising Spring,
where hell can be seen glinting
in its warm home from home.
