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 –
dutifully inspired undoubtedly
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.
By David Selzer