Pleading For Peace

If politicians’ pens are stronger than swords, 

then they must be weaker than those missiles and drones— 

gushing pints of ink, lying broken amongst the rubble

of bombed-out buildings, where families once lived. 

Horror pours from so many punctured hearts,

as the feet of phallic hubris march and crush our reason

into the suffocating mud of cruelty and greed— 

a crime against conscience— a tumult of tears. 

Once, chariots of fire carried prophets to their rest, 

having paid in full that most hard-won of fares, 

while today, earthbound arrows of flame and fear, 

deliver, without charge, the innocent to theirs. 

Rows of steel ribs and crumbling, concrete spines

scribble their twilight epitaphs across a charcoal sky,

above a garden where love is wrecked by sirens’ songs— 

where forgiveness sweats blood under burnt and bitter olives.

Bombers pelt the pocky lands—staccatos of screams, 

unheard by exospheric eyes above its grimacing face. 

Yet, there are angels in the dimples, applying the salve of kindness 

with one hand, as the other prays for softer rain. 

The fog of war refracts the light of human good 

into a septa-colour ark of saving grace— 

a lighthouse, waving us past the jaws of a collective grave, 

and, at its end, a cure for our addiction to dust and ashes.