WAR AND MOTHER EARTH (C)

New Paltz Nation Award--Poem of the Week

Mother earth drinks the blood of our young.

Consumes their bodies slowly.

Spits out their undigested bones.

Desert-sun-bleached bones.
Charred black bones.

Buzzard cleaned bones.

Bone bits.

A skull.

Fractured.

Missing perfect white teeth.

Gaping hole.

Never to grin again.

Empty sockets stare,

Blue-less, Green-less, Brown-less,
Black-less orbs,

Life and promise

Gone.

Hand
rises from mounded sand

bent fingers
grasp the air,

leathery skin-strips flutter,

torrid wind whistles, moans

through porous joints,

across fingertips no longer

able to touch tender lips.

Son.

Daughter.

Slaughtered.

For terrorist-tyrants

of so-called free,
and not-so-free world.

For cowards.

Puffed peacocks

hiding behind Lincolnesque desks,

sitting on straw mats in dirt-dug caves
safely planning each others annihilation,
guaranteeing their immortality
in future war stories told
around graven-image monuments,

hallowed spots tourist-mourners
will place flowers on.

And Mother Earth will continue to belch up bones

to bleach white in wind-whipped sands

blowing across unmarked

mass graves of young and old,

across

son

daughter

unfound

hand rising up from ground,
with stories
never lived,
and never

told.