The dogs of war
Wars are the witchcraft of wasted politicians Where young men jinxed with promise of glory Vouchsafe their innocence to a gory end. Wars are bloodthirsty games of rich people Pitting the poor and homeless in a cock ght, And their children, the children of doom Must pawn their dignity and their lives To grease the war machine with youthful blood
Wars are the most blatant disregard for life Where politicians massage their demented egos By scratching and lacerating with claws
At the gangrenous sores of society.
See the glory-seeking girls of my ghetto, Secondhand high heels and bleached skins And the boys chest-up with bravado, Brimming ambitions in their brains
And a ball of marijuana in the pocket;
In the street pocked with venereal disease, Idyllic in their squalor
Idyllic in their squalor
Until the politician arrives like Father Christmas A sinister booty in the place of re-crackers Molotov cocktails, motor bombs and Kalashnikovs Anything to turn our fun-loving sons and daughters Into scowling and sour-faced rebels
Killing machines with no qualms to extinguish a town.
Whose son stands there
Caressing the nipples of motor-bombs
As he would the boobs of his favourite girl? Ready to sanitise a poor village with nitroglycerine He has no more need for the dollar prostitute His mind is full of a psychotic joy
His pants full of rape
To rip apart the virgin peasant-girls
Then climax with a machete what his man-hood starts.
His mind is a cauldron of charred feeling
A kamikaze pilot who has learned death by rote, Who sings it and signs it even in his sleep; A cauterised soul with icy nerves of a suicide bomber.
Ready to impoverish his mother’s nurturing womb By turning himself into a speck of dust…
For what!
As if poverty is not punishment enough,
The poor are always caught in wars not theirs, Swallowing at slogans the placebos of hope, What maxim of freedom will you tell the emaciated children of Somalia?
And the mothers of Mozambique,
The issue of whose wombs must fatten the dogs of war?
What tear-sodden prayer can stem the Congo of woe
Over owing with the blood of infants
The otsam of embryonic peace aborted?