The warm wind sweet with blossoms blows
The stink of death from broken spires,
Where sunlight spilled by dawn her light alike bestows
On poppies in their rows and corpses on the wire.
Birdsong lilts where shellfire screamed the night before,
Where the earth was torn still grows life's hardy germ;
By rising sun and turning world our woe ignored,
By gods too busy with their own concerns.
Light the city's shell-shocked shadows now dissolves
And glints with mimicry of life on sightless eyes
In the dead who for a second seem of death absolved
But bathing in the sun forever, do not rise.
Neighbours, friends and children still lying in the streets
In some eternal mockery of peace abide,
Who on their final morning wake not from cooling sleep,
Their end by shattered limbs and burning flesh contrived.
For them the pain is over, their flesh no longer hurts
But for we, the cursed survivors, life goes on,
A living hell of fire and shell and worse,
Wondering who by dusk will next be gone.
But now we watch the dawn with dazed surprise,
For it seemed the End of Days came in the night
And all the world convulsed and shut its eyes,
This town a graveyard made, a sepulchre shut tight.
Yet nature missed no beat, nor spared a second glance;
The day unseemly comes on cue hell-bent to mock
Lost hope by sweeping through our wake with dance,
With banners bright, with joy that falters not.
Thus we must rise with aches, our hunger and our fear,
For life goes on remorseless even yet,
Compelled to watch the day make nothing of despair,
Whose smile by contrast sharpens our regret.
Regret so it appears has coalesced
Into the huddled shapes of human form:
A knot of us as if by time's reverse regressed
To primal fears, to dirt and rags thin-worn.
Gathered in a basement 'neath a mound of splintered stone
Of a home caved inward like a failing heart,
Our sorry band assembled as if commanded to atone
For sins not ours by gods whose altars crumbled in the dark.
Christian, Moslem, Unbelievers all, we twelve
Apostles of a brotherhood drawn by common pain
Foreswore the hate whose reasons unrecalled did melt
In new resolve that Man made well shall never fail again.
In the end are all men in truth defined
By their contracts made, by that to which they will agree;
And if Man revived will from his woe emerge more fine
Then 'tis new and wiser contracts made shall set him free.
For war to thrive good men must mis-identify
Each the other good men as their foe
And false-believe them evil, by subterfuge and lie;
Such seeds take root, by Satan's agents sown.
Good to wrongly target good is thus seduced
And good devours good, while Satan ever so amused
Enjoys the spectacle of blood he so cleverly produced,
Where deflected fall the arrows and the barbs his rightful due.
But in the end could none of us recall how came we there,
Nor name the wrong that earned the other man our hate.
When the shell explodes, the reasons for its flight laid bare
Reveal their speciousness too late
To retract or to regret our folly or turn it back
Unexploded to its spiteful breach,
Or reverse the tanks that crushed beneath their tracks
Hopes that now uncrushed, once more reach
The shrivelled kernels of broken hearts
With breath of life that doth revive the dead.
Yet where the world ended a new world did start,
That flouts the logic of our hate and embraces love instead.
We swore our oath, we twelve and pledges made
To Man and Over Nation, this country we call Earth,
That what was shattered shall be made whole again
And the death of yesterday shall become tomorrow's birth.
The Over Nation then was in Sarajevo's rubble born,
We twelve knights by flex of will a new flame sparked:
One world, one nation, one race to this full sworn,
To Man, the fire of stars, to the foes of Man, the dark.
kieron mcfadden
