SIX VARIATIONS ON A THEME

The torturers go home for supper,

and look quietly in on their children sleeping.

The torturers’ boss is still at work

in his well-lit, air conditioned office.

A master of capital letters

and clichés, he is drafting a speech.

He will mention Liberty and Peace,

in addition to Duty, Freedom and God.

***

There is no price tag on Liberty and Peace.

More than a hundred little girls, in perhaps

less than half a minute, were murdered

by two cruise missiles, each one of which

will have cost many times more to build

than the school in which the children were slaughtered.

***

To reach the border and the famed lakes beyond

tourists must drive through forests of dense pine

and oak and beech, past red ringed signs warning

of wild boars and bears, and finally

through a ruined village – at one end

a burnt out mosque, the other a church.

***

A shepherd watching his flock on scrubland

his family have owned for generations

is shot to death by a young man of his own age

whose great grandparents were gassed to death.

‘Vengeance is mine!’ declares the shared god.

***

A consultant to arms manufacturers –

and, no doubt, dutifully inspired

by the man with the rictus grin, gleaming teeth,

dead eyes, and money in many banks,

who always assumes that  someone else’s

relative and loved one will die for him –

the retired general with the port wine face,

speaking to camera in his book-lined study,

tells us that much, much less must be spent

on the poor, the elderly, the disabled,

in short, the vulnerable so that we will have

enough guns for when the Russians come

in five years’ time. In the studio

the presenter and the panel of experts nod

sagely, and ask for no evidence.

Meanwhile, each month on the Ukrainian steppe

and in its forests a small town’s worth

of Russian soldiers die like their ancestors.

***

And this might be the way the world ends,

not with the Four Horsemen or the Rapture, but

with TV networks fixing cameras

at certain locations to live stream

whatever may occur and whenever –

currently, places like the ruins

of Gaza City, the more or less intact

southern suburbs of Beirut, Tel Aviv’s

presently pristine city centre,

and an oil terminal in the Persian Gulf –

in readiness for Armageddon.