Eight Heads

Election Day in California, Bush. I'm headed out to do my civic duty, so I'll be brief. Just wanted to post the poem that came to me this morning as I woke. I hate all this bloody violence, which succeeds in nothing but the creation of more bloody violence. We remove Saddam Hussein (good thing) and leave the country at the mercy of intolerant religious zealots (bad thing). And the killing doesn't stop.

EIGHT HEADS

Eight human heads
in a fruit crate. Eight
human heads, eight heads
once human, now severed
from their bodies, discarded,
so much rotten fruit packed
in a fruit crate for disposal.
With them, tucked in, a note
of explanation: these were men
of a different sect, of different
beliefs in the same god,
suspected to have killed
doctors, the note said,
of their religious rivals.

Eight heads, then, found
in a fruit crate, wrapped
in blankets to be carried,
reverently, from the place
of their discovery. Such
are the acts of war. We saw
the pictures. We recoiled
in horror at the barbarity
of such acts of vengeance.
Recoiled, even though
our own men are reduced,
by war, to similar acts
of bloody, violent revenge.

We, the rescuers, who came
here, to this place, to save
a people from their tyrant
by acts of war. Violence
begets violence, begets
violence. And human heads
are severed, served to us
in fruit crates, while innocent
civilians, men, women, children,
beg for their lives before
the vengeful hail of bullets
from their saviors’ guns.

Such are the acts of war.