Thursday 23 March 2017

No Safety In Sunders

I swear to you, I pledge
I will not mark myself safe
No matter if the skies should fall
Or the earth belch fire around me.

When my brothers die in Damascus
Under jihadi hell bombs
I am not safe.
When my sister's children cry
In the ruins of Gaza, a hard winter night
I am not safe.
When my siblings are broken bodies
In a Baghdad street, just one more car bomb blown by
I am not safe
Or when they're charred ashes in Sanaa
As Saudi planes fill the sky;

I am not safe,
Not when women scream in Mogadishu
And die unknown in Maiduguri.

When they crouch in Donbass cellars
As Nazi shells fall
I am not safe, I cannot walk tall.
When in Kabul they look around the
Wreck of a nation once great
And their children dream of drones
I am not safe,

And I never will be.


Copyright B Purkayastha 2017



3 comments:

  1. Thank you Bill. So true and yet so beautifully stated here.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Most of us will never be, but in many places it is so much worse.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Excellent war poetry. I mostly know WWI war poetry, and that only from the English-speaking poets (since I am monolingual). Those WWI poets (mostly) figured out that it wasn't the Germans that were the problem, even as they were shooting at Germans and being shot at by Germans.

    This poetry is for those being shot at (and droned) who have no weapons to shoot back, except poetry.

    MichaelWme

    ReplyDelete

Full comment moderation is enabled on this site, which means that your comment will only be visible after the blog administrator (in other words, yours truly) approves it. The purpose of this is not to censor dissenting viewpoints; in fact, such viewpoints are welcome, though it may lead to challenges to provide sources and/or acerbic replies (I do not tolerate stupidity).

The purpose of this moderation is to eliminate spam, of which this blog attracts an inordinate amount. Spammers, be warned: it takes me less time to delete your garbage than it takes for you to post it.

Proceed.